Snow White and the Giants J T Mcintosh

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SNOW WHITE AND THE GIANTS
J.T. McIntosh
(1966)

THE BEAUTIFUL
STRANGERS WERE BENT
ON RESHAPING HISTORY!

SNOW WHITE AND THE GIANTS

J.T. McINTOSH'S
TERRIFYING NOVEL OF
THE TIMELOOPERS

THE TIMELOOPERS

Val's friend Jota had been killed in a "duel" with the strangers. But there he stood, as if nothing had ever happened to him. "They did it with the loops," he said. "They looped me back into exist- ence."

Why were the strangers so concerned with Jota? And why with Val? The two men were to be kept alive at all costs. They would be among the few to survive The Catastrophe, an exercise for the "giants," who were playing with history and creating havoc in the lives of the two unwitting and unwilling stars of this fiery drama.

SNOW WHITE AND THE GIANTS

J.T. McIntosh

AN AVON BOOK

This Avon edition is the first publication in volume form of "Snow White and the Giants," which was previously serialized in Worlds of If Science Fiction.

AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
959 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10019

Copyright © 1966, 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.
Published by arrangement with the author.

All rights reserved, which includes the right
to reproduce this book or portions thereof in
any form whatsoever. For information address
Lurton Blassingame, 60 East 42 Street,
New York, New York 10017.

First Avon Printing, May, 1968

Cover illustration by Carl Cassler

AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND
FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTERED TRADEMARK --
MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

SNOW WHITE
and
THE GIANTS

Chapter One

Lunching at the Red Lion on roast beef of Old England, I glanced out of the upstairs window and saw, across the road, a girl in a pink suit.

A moment later I choked, a morsel of meat went down the wrong way, and for a second or two, fighting for breath, eyes streaming, I couldn't see anything.

When I could see again she was just a girl in a pink suit walking along a narrow street in a quiet town, possibly the quietest country town in England. I went back to the roast beef. What I had thought I saw was a trick of the sunlight, obviously.

Many remarkable and some impossible things had been attributed to the sun in the last month or two, since a preternaturally hot summer took England by surprise. A hot summer always took England by surprise. When Byron wrote of the English winter ending in July to recommence in August, he wasn't coining an epigram. He was merely stating the obvious.

But this year . . .

In Shuteley we weren't concerned with things that happened in London, Liverpool or Leeds. In places like that anything could happen. When we heard that three Socialist M.P.s had turned up at the House of Commons dressed in sandals and shorts, we sniffed and decided to vote Tory next time (as we always did anyway).

In Shuteley, however:

The river was so low that about four miles upstream you could walk across, something which had never happened before in the history of Shuteley, which went back to the Ark.

We had the first-ever traffic jam in the center of town, and it was caused by a mini-car sticking in melted and churned-up tar.

After a school strike, all classes at the Grammar School were held outside, every day, and all regulations about the wearing of school uniform were suspended, with sometimes startling results.

A poacher claimed in court that the trout he took from a pool was not only dead, but already cooked. Although this was agreed to be the tale to beat all anglers' tales, he was discharged without a stain on his character (except those which were there already).

The hot summer was not, we were told, caused by anything of any permanent significance, and next year the temperature would probably be normal. A combination of factors, said the meteorologists (and they'd go into a wealth of detail if you gave them half a chance) was keeping the temperature up and the rainfall down. Such conditions might not recur for two hundred years.

Every year I could remember, and I could remember about thirty, plus a few more about which I had vague childhood impressions, people had complained about the poor summer. Now they complained about the hot summer, probably more in Shuteley than in most places, because we were right in the middle of an agricultural area. This kind of weather was fine for growing grapes, but the farmers in the area weren't growing grapes.

I finished my meal unenthusiastically. In the midday heat no one was hungry. Yet habit was too strong for us to go over to the Continental routine of light lunches and heavy late dinners. So even though the Red Lion, at best, didn't claim to serve anything more ambitious than good plain meals, I still went there every day for lunch.

There were several convenient reasons for not going home for lunch -- pressure of business, the uncertainty of my lunch hour, saving Sheila the trouble of having to prepare a proper meal for me when neither she nor Dina ever ate more at midday in the summer than a few scraps of lettuce and a tomato.

But the real reason for not going home was the atmosphere there. If I didn't get French cooking at the Red Lion, at least, with my slice of history and Old English apple pie, I got some Old English peace and quiet.

The dining room at the Red Lion, directly above the bar, was the pleasantest room in Shuteley, and that was probably why I nearly always lunched there, in spite of the food. It had windows on three sides, a high roof, oak stalls which ensured quiet as well as privacy, spotless linen, and middle-aged waitresses who afforded no possible distraction. It was the kind of room you often find in a very old town, not aggressively modern, not dating back to Magna Carta -- a room which had been many things in its time, which had been modified and renovated and redecorated time and again, but never until it cried out for it, which had been left alone apart from cleaning and painting for at least thirty years.

Also, it was never too hot. You had to say this for solid old buildings -- there wasn't much they couldn't keep out. I sighed as I finished the apple tart. And I wished . . .

I wasn't old. I was thirty-three. I was married to a pretty girl nine years younger. As manager of an important insurance office, I was probably one of the three most important men in Shuteley. I had no money worries, no health worries; no children to worry about, no relatives to worry about, except Dina and a mother in a mental home -- and by the time people are in a mental home and so far gone that the medical staff advise you not to visit them, there's certainly no point in worrying about them.

I was probably envied. I couldn't he sure, because a young boss has to be careful. He can't be too friendly, or people take advantage.

I was pretty solitary and old before my time.

And I wished something would happen.

I'd heard a story about the two-year-old son of the principal English master at the Grammar School. The infant had been at his first kids' party, and he didn't like it. He was found under the Christmas tree, crying his eyes out. Asked why, in the middle of all the fun and games, he wasn't happy like everybody else, he said: "I'm so terribly, terribly bored."

Well, a kid like that was only repeating what he'd heard at home. Poor kid, he thought it was impressively grownup to be bored.

I wasn't two. I wasn't bored, exactly. I just wanted something to happen, sure that when things settled down afterwards they couldn't be worse and might easily be better.

And something happened.

When the waitress said there was a phone call for me I was neither surprised nor interested, even when she said it was long-distance.

But when I picked up the phone in the office and found the call was from Cologne, I certainly wondered. No senior executive of FLAG was likely to call me from Cologne, in such a hurry that the call had to he put through to the Red Lion.

And when I heard Jota's voice, all sorts of feelings hit me all at once.

I hadn't seen him for two years, not since the row. I'd been quite glad not to see him, naturally enough, and yet I had missed him. He was my cousin. He had also been, perhaps still was, my best friend. I wasn't entirely sure I liked him: but you don't have to like your best friend.

"Val," he announced, "I'm Coming back." i

"Permanently?" I asked, without wild enthusiasm.

"Hell, no. But there's been trouble here."

"The usual trouble, I suppose."

"Well, apart from that, her husband's dead. No, nothing to do with me, of course. But she thinks . . . Anyway, I'm coming home for a while. Can I stay with you?"

"As to that, Jota," I said cautiously, stalling, "I'm not altogether . . . I mean -- "

"Oh, that business is finished," said Jota airily. "Never began, really. Still, maybe . . . I do see your point. I could go to Gil instead. Not much risk of trouble there." And he chuckled.

Then he said: "I suppose it's hot in Shuteley too?"

"As Hades."

"Anyway, it must be cooler than it is here. I'll fly home. Expect me some time tomorrow."

And he hung up.

Jota and Gil Carswell and I had been the Terrible Three of the Third at the Grammar School. In the Fourth, Fifth and Six we remained inseparable but only one of us remained Terrible. Maturity had made Gil morose, engulfed me in respectability, and made Jota more Terrible than ever, especially after he invented sex.

Once Jota had been Clarence Mulliner, but the name was abandoned, unwept and unsung, from the day a science master dubbed him J.O.A.T.A.M.O.N., for Jack of all trades and master of none. For about a week he had been Joatamon, and then in the way of nicknames, convenience had made him Jota.

I paid my bill, crossed the road to the office, and there I found a crowd around old Tommy Hardcastle, who was trying desperately to explain something and getting nowhere.

"Break it up," I said coldly.

Nobody budged.

"But Mr. Mathers," said Wilma Shelly, "he says he saw -- "

"I did see her," Tommy said eagerly. "As clear as I'm seeing you, Mr. Mathers. She was walking along the street, right past the front door. Not six feet from me. She had a pink suit on -- "

"And she didn't have it on," said Sayell, who fancied himself as a wit and was half right. "She was walking along the street in the nude with a pink suit on,"

"That's right," said Tommy, relieved to be understood at last, and the sniggers swelled.

A tall thin youth from the accounts department, who always tried to settle everything to the last decimal part of a penny, said: "She was wearing a see-through dress, Tommy? Lace, maybe?"

"No, it was an ordinary pink suit, but sometimes it wasn't there. I mean . . . " He floundered on, and the boys and girls chuckled and giggled, and for the time being I didn't stop them.

I had seen the girl too. And I had thought, just for a moment, as she turned and glanced across the street, that she was wearing a pink skirt and giving away everything above her waistband free. The impression had been strong enough to make me choke.

Of course in such a summer there had been some startling sartorial spectacles. I wouldn't have turned a hair if the girl had been wearing a bikini, because all over, that summer, even in Shuteley, conventional ideas about when and where to wear what had been tacitly dropped. Even policemen were allowed to wear shorts, and sometimes only shorts.

But long before this remarkable summer, the world had decided it wasn't ready for the topless dress. And that wasn't all. If the girl had been casually strolling along the street in a topless dress, I'd have goggled but I wouldn't have choked. It was the abrupt change before my eyes, like a piece of montage in a movie, that hit me.

"Now you see it, now you don't," Sayell was saying, working hard for more laughs.

Although that was exactly what I was thinking myself, I came down sharply on Sayell and the rest of them, sending them all back to their desks except Tommy, who went to the door.

"I did see her, Mr. Mathers," Tommy insisted.

"Of course you did, Tommy."

I went to my private office, thought for a moment, shrugged, and started work.

The Shuteley branch of the Fire, Life and General Insurance Company -- usually known as FLAG -- was unique in its way. Shuteley, situated in the approximate middle of England, was a fair-sized old-world town, yet there was only one insurance office that counted -- ours.

This was almost entirely due to the cunning and villainy of one Amos Hardy, an old rogue who died in 1913 at the age of 108. As a young man, he set up his own insurance company in the town, with no capital and no connections, and, it was said, had not been above fire-raising in the early days when insurance was a more adventurous business than it is now. After 1909 every fire insurance company had to deposit Ł20,000 with the Board of Trade before it could do business -- but by that time, having made hay while the sun shone, the wily old scoundrel was making the law, and not obeying it more than he ever did.

He got such a hold on insurance in the town, did old Amos, that by the time he died nobody for miles around knew that other insurance companies existed. Of course, his business was eventually taken over by FLAG, a big national firm, but Amos had done his work so well that even in the sixties any agent of any other firm trying to drum up business in Shuteley was wasting good expense money.

That was why, in a sleepy country town that had more of Old England left in it than most -- we still had a village green with a pump, surrounded by timbered houses in which Queen Elizabeth might have slept, but had not -- there was an insurance office the size of a young factory.

One of the girls had to go to the bank, and I gave her a message for Gil Carswell, who worked in the local branch of the Midland Bank, merely telling him that Mr. Mulliner would be arriving the next day.

She had just left the room when the phone rang. My calls were vetted: this was one I had to take. I announced myself.

"Sheila here," said the phone, rather starkly.

"Yes, honey?"

"Dina has locked herself in her room."

I didn't manage to place the crisis, though clearly there was one. "What about it?" I said.

"Have you forgotten, Val? The electrician's here. Mr. Jerome. He has to get into Dina's room."

"Well, tell her to come out."

Sheila sighed in exasperation. "There is now no further competition for the silliest suggestion of the month."

"Well, I suppose you did tell her. Tell her again. Make her come out."

"Break the door down?"

I was exasperated too. "If you have to."

"A great heavy teak door? With my own fair hands? Hardly, Val. Mr. Jerome would have to do it. And then -- "

"Yes, yes, I know." And then it would be all over town that Dina Mathers had tantrums and locked herself in and doors had to be burst open. "What did she say," I asked, "when you told her to come out?"

"She said," Sheila said evenly, "that she was scared of the fairies."

"The what?"

"You heard. Last night she saw fairies at the bottom of the garden. So she's staying in her room. They may be good fairies, but she isn't taking any chances."

I didn't prolong the discussion. "All right," I said. "I'll come over."

Sheila and I got along no worse than most imperfect marital partnerships. We might have got along a lot better -- Sheila certainly thought so -- but for Dina.

Dina was my kid sister, tiny, seventeen, as pretty as a picture and sunny-tempered with everyone but Sheila. One reason why I cracked down so hard on anyone who made fun of Tommy Hardcastle was because, although Tommy and Dina couldn't be more different in every other way, they had one thing in common . . .

I slipped out as quietly as I could, because it never does an office any good when the boss goes out and everybody knows it isn't on business. I took the car from the firm's car park and drove out past the Grammar School . . .

. . . And stopped. A hundred or so boys between thirteen and fourteen, all wearing blue shorts, filled the road.

The Grammar School was four hundred years old. The school field was a hundred yards along the road, on the other side of it, and there was no changing accommodation. So the kids changed at the school, crossed the road to the field, and came back after sports.

The arrangement, or lack of same, was typical of Shuteley.

After all the boys had crossed, I drove past the castle across the Old Bridge and turned into the track which led to our Queen Anne house about a quarter of a mile beyond the town boundary. The track also served a few farms farther on.

Sheila, in a paint-speckled sweater and jeans powdered with plaster, had evidently been tidying up after the electrician. She was a slim twenty-four-year-old blonde, and I had not married her because she was the ugliest girl in Shuteley.

"All right," she said grimly. "You shift her."

"You didn't . . . say anything, honey, did you?" I asked tentatively.

She knew what I meant. "I told her the electrician had to work in her room, that's all. And she talked about fairies."

I sighed. Dina just couldn't see why I wanted Sheila around, and never would. What did I want with another girl when I had her? And Sheila, though she had no deficiency of understanding, was driven quietly desperate by the way Dina, the moment my back was turned, became as mulishly, deliberately obstinate as ouly a grown-up child could be.

I didn't see Mr. Jerome, who had found a job to do elsewhere in the house. I went up to Dina's room, Sheila at my heels, and tapped on the door.

"Dina, honey," I said.

"Val?" came Dina's voice, surprised and slightly, but only slightly, apprehensive. "What are you doing home at this time?"

"You have to come out, honey," I said patiently.

"No. I'm scared of the fairies."

"Fairies don't do you any harm."

"How do you know?"

"Dina, you didn't really see anything at all, did you?"

"I saw the fairy ring. In the wood. Didn't Sheila tell you? I'd have told you this morning, only you were gone before I got up. I thought Sheila would have told you."

No one could be as innocent as Dina when she was trying to make trouble for Sheila.

"Anyway," I said, "you've got to come out."

A brief pause, then: "I can't. I'm not dressed."

"Then get dressed."

Triumphantly: "Sheila took all my clothes away."

Sheila's eyes met mine. She didn't have to tell me that any clothes she'd taken were to be washed.

"Come out, Dina," I said more sternly.

There was silence.

Sheila held my gaze steadily. "This is what I have to put up with all day and every day," she was saying, without uttering a word. I didn't say anything either. She knew what I was thinking too. What could a man do? There wasn't anywhere else Dina could go. Our father was dead, and our mother . . . well, to give Sheila her due, even in our bitterest rows she never brought up the subject of Mary, who was in an institution, who was the reason why Dina was the way she was, who was the reason why Sheila and I had no children and never would have.

At last the door clicked and Dina came out. Exactly five feet, dark-haired, she had the unsophisticated beauty that sometimes occurs in the feeble-minded. She also had a highly provocative body that would create a lot of problem soon, though they hadn't caused trouble yet. Not all men could he expected to keep their hands off such an attractive creature simply because there was a short-circuit in her head.

She wore a faded cotton dress far too small for her, split down the front and unfastened at the back, because there was no possibility of getting the buttons to close. Her feet were bare.

"Now listen," I said more harshly than usual, "I have to get back to work. Will you promise, Dina, word of honor, to go to the summerhouse and stay there till I get home again?"

"But the summerhouse is near the wood."

"Fairies only come out at night. You never saw fairies in the daytime, now, did you?"

She frowned. It was quite true that she had never seen fairies in the daytime,

If she gave her word she would keep it. She was trying to figure out a loophole that wguld enable her to do what she liked without exactly breaking a promise. If she could find one, she'd promise.

"Word of honor?" I insisted.

"Oh, all right," she said. "Now?"

"Now."

She scampered downstairs, quite content again already. She would be able to stay in the summerhouse all afternoon, talking to herself or playing with the dolls she had there, without any feeling that she was being confined, or even that she'd done anything to be confined for.

On the point of telling Sheila that Jota was coming, I decided it would be wise to wait for a better moment. "See you, honey," I said, and leaned forward to peck her cheek.

She leaned back, avoiding me. "Honey," she said. "Everybody is 'honey.' I'm 'honey,' Dina's 'honey.' Am I like her? Do you think of me like her?"'

I didn't want to get involved in anything. "Bye, Sheila," I said, and went back to the ear.

I had just crossed the Old Bridge when the engine coughed and died. I cursed silently. When I had left the car in the lot I had known perfectly well I'd have to stop at the filling station on my way home, and I would have, if I hadn't been called out unexpectedly to deal with a domestic crisis.

I was about as far from a garage as I could be in Shuteley. The street I was on was so narrow that planning permission for garages had been refused, there being no room for cars to stop and fill up. I'd have to walk back to the office and phone a garage to pick the car up.

I left the key in the car and started walking. No one would touch the car, not in Shuteley. Kids might, but the car would be picked up before the Grammar School came out.

In the early afternoon, on the outskirts of town, there was very little traffic and few pedestrians, for there were no shops out here and Shuteley was not on the main route from anywhere important to anywhere else. In fact, there was nobody else in sight but one girl, and my eyes rested on her and didn't register a thing, because I was thinking about Dina and Sheila and me and wondering gloomily if there was any solution to the age-old problem of two women in one house.

I was also envying Jota, who got his girls on a conveniently temporary basis (invariably stunning and wildly cooperative girls at that) and who got them in every country on the map, plus a few that weren't.

All in all, I was pretty sorry for myself. It wasn't my fault that my father had married a woman who was already close to insanity and went closer. It wasn't my fault he escaped the problems he had created by dying. It wasn't my fault Dina was the way she was. It wasn't my fault Sheila and I didn't dare have children.

It seemed to me that my problems, unlike those of everybody else, had been created for me and were no fault of mine.

Suddenly I blinked and looked again at the girl coming toward me.

She was not the girl in the pink suit. Although I had seen that girl only across the street and from a second-story window, one thing I was sure of was that she had blue-black hair. This was a near-blonde of about eighteen, wearing a green dress.

Or was she?

At the moment, beyond all doubt, she was. She was very tall and not particularly attractive -- just a girl who would not as a rule attract a second glance, unless on account of her height.

She came level with me, not paying the slightest attention to me -- and that must have been an act, because when a girl passes a man goggling at her with all three eyes, it just isn't possible for her not to notice.

And as she passed me, it happened again. Not the same thing -- it never seemed to be the same thing. This time, side-on, I saw palely tanned flesh from ankles to armpit, uninterrupted.

When she had passed, I swung round, of course. However, whatever I'd seen or thought I'd seen, all there was to be seen now, though I watched her out of sight, was a very tall girl in an ordinary green dress, wearing ordinary shoes. The only thing that was slightly unusual was that I could swear she wasn't wearing nylons.

She did have, too -- and this was the first time I noticed it -- a certain baffling elegance, or smartness, or neatness. As I said, she wasn't a particularly pretty girl, and though not fat, she didn't have a sensational figure. Yet there was something about her that reminded me of the difference I had vaguely sensed when Sheila had pointed out to me a woman in a Paris creation and a woman trying hard to look as if she was in a Paris creation.

Whatever it was that women wanted to have when they dressed up, this girl had it -- even if she had very little else to contribute.

As I walked on, for a moment an old shadow darkened my mind. Mentally I was normal, indeed well above average. I'd been told after physical and psychiatric examinations that there was no trace of psychosis or anything in that terrifying area, no brain damage, no malformation. Yet no one with a background like mine could escape occasional grim doubts and fears.

I dismissed the idea for a moment, only to find it creeping back when I remembered that the only other person who had seen this kind of phenomenon was Tommy. Maybe this was something that happened only to people like Tommy and Dina and me.

Tommy had seen something -- once. I had seen something -- twice. And Dina had seen something. Fairies, she said. Or rather, a "fairy ring."

Nobody else, apparently, had seen anything.

I went back to the office, called the Central Garage and gave instructions about my car. Then I worked hard for all of an hour.

When the phone rang I answered absently, still able to concentrate fairly successfully on insurance -- for the last time in weeks.

"Val," said Sheila, "now the electrician has to get into the summerhouse."

"Oh, hell," I groaned.

I should have known. The wiring in our house dated back with the rest of the house, I strongly suspected, to the time of Queen Anne. I'd probably have let it be as long as it worked, but a FLAG executive from London, paying a semi-social call, happened to notice the wiring in the house and hinted strongly that it was hardly the thing for the tocal insurance manager to have an electrical system in his own house that constituted a greater fire risk then a moat filled with crude oil. So we had called in Mr. Jerome.

The cable out to the summerhouse was probably more dangerous even than enything in the house itself.

Obviously Sheila had already asked Dina to let the electrician in. In childish triumph, Dina saw how to score over Sheila after all. Dina had promised to stay in the summerhouse till I got back. So she'd keep her promise. Come hell or high water, she'd barricade herself in and stay where she'd promised to stay.

"I can't come again," I said. "Can't he come back tomorrow?"

"He says if he doesn't finish today he won't get back for a week."

"Well, get her out," I said in sudden irritation. "Don't keep calling me."

"She's your sister."

"Sure, but you're there and I'm here. Surely you can outsmart someone like Dina?"

"Get her out, you said?" Sheila retorted in a hard voice. "Okay. I'll get her out. I'm bigger then she is, and older, and much tougher. I'll get her out. And I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to have the time of my life."

There was something unusually vicious about the click as she hung up.

I didn't care. I was fed up with Sheila end Dina. Why couldn't either of them, just once, in their different ways, leave me alone? Sheila was always with me, Dina was always with me. I couldn't settle down to my work any morning or any afternoon with the slightest confidence that I wouldn't suddenly be called upon to deal with a Sheila problem or a Dina problem.

Rather wildly, I thought: why couldn't Sheila and Dina fight to the death so that there. would be only one of them left? I could render unto Sheila the things that were Sheila's only if Dina didn't interfere -- and vice versa.

But could I put Dina in an institution? No. Apart from anything else, she was too innocently reasonable. Even if I wanted to do it, I doubted if Dina could be certified. She wasn't even feeble-minded in the usual sense. In many ways she was quick end shrewd. In no way was she slow. She was quite a bright eight-year-old -- only she happened to have a body nine years older.

Grimly I forced myself to work. But my heart wasn't in it.

Chapter Two

Business with an agent kept me at the office until about seven, and when we were through I took him for a drink. Since he didn't like noisy pubs we went to the new cocktail lounge, The Copper Beech.

The place was empty when we entered. People going for a drink on their way home went to the pubs. The Copper Beech, all glass and chromium end plastic and inflated prices, catered mostly for couples and parties having a night out, from eight o'clock onwards.

The agent gulped his beer and departed, and I finished my pint of bitter in more leisurely fashion. I was downing the last drop when a party of kids in their late teens came in, quietly for kids, looked around and marched to the far end of the lounge.

They were all in shorts and blouses, end for a moment I thought they were Grammar School seniors. Then I saw that they were all about eighteen or over, too old and far too tall to be school kids. All the men were over six feet, and the girls not much less.

With merely a glence at them I was rising to go. In Shuteley in summer we saw hundreds of campers, hikers end cyclists.

Then I saw that one of the girls was the girl in the green dress, and another, the only one who was not tall, had blue-black hair.

I ordered another pint end sat down again. The bartender rapped on a partition behind him and a waitress in a black frock came to attend to the new customers.

There were eight boys end eight girls. They weren't noisy and they evidently intended to keep strictly to themselves, for they sat together in a corner round one table and only one of them spoke to the waitress, giving the order. The others didn't even talk among themselves until she left them. Then they started talking and laughing like any other kids, only more quietly, as if afraid they'd be overheard.

The girl I had seen wearing the extraordinary green dress was now clad like the others. She had not looked at me and perhaps wouldn't have known me if she did, because earlier, in the afternoon, she had gone to a lot of trouble not to look at me at all.

Now I saw that they weren't exactly like any other group of young campers after all.

I wouldn't have noticed anything out of the ordinary if I hadn't had a spur to my curiosity. Nobody else did. As it was, I saw for the second time a curious immaculacy which seemed to be common to them all. Every one of these kids was a glossy, spotless, highly-polished model of a teenage camper.

I thought about that and remembered where I'd seen the same kind of glossy unreality before.

A pretty girl really on a jungle safari might conceivably spend most of her time in a leopard-skin swimsuit or a white suntop and shorts, though it's unlikely. But unlike actresses in safari movies, she simply could not go on day after day looking as if she'd just stepped from her dressing-room.

That was it. That was exactly it. The boys in this group had every hair slick in place. Their shirts were dazzling. There wasn't a spot even on their shoes. The girls weren't in the usual motley collection of loose sweaters, tight sweaters and rumpled shorts. Everything anyone wore had been made to measure, and there wasn't a crease to be seen among the lot of them.

A small thing? Certainly -- a small impossible thing. Did these kids have dressing-rooms right outside The Copper Beech?

Two or three of the girls were pretty, and one had a one-in-a-million face. Out of any large group of girls you could pick a dozen of more or less uniform prettiness, attractive through the possession of firm young bodies and regular features, well-shaped eyebrows, small noses, soft mouths. But it would be a matter of chance if, even in a hundred thousand girls, you'd find one with both the individuality to make her unmistakable and unforgettable and the beauty to go with it.

One girl had the kind of face that could launch a thousand nuclear submarines.

She had blue-black hair, very white skin, and was probably the girl who for me had started it all, the girl in the pink suit. But I couldn't be sure. Apart from her beauty, other things set her slightly apart from the rest. She was only about five feet four, easily the smallest in the group. She was pale and all the others were tanned. She might have been a little older than the others. She was treated with a certain slight deference. And despite what I've been saying about them, she made the others look untidy.

I sipped my beer, not inviting conversation with the bartender, who was busy anyway. As it happened I'd been sitting facing the far corner when the kids entered, and could therefore go on looking in their direction without showing undue curiosity.

I managed to pick up a few words. They were talking about a "duel." A duel, they thought, would be fun. Some argued, said it was a crazy idea.

Evidently they'd seen the plaque on one of the old houses round the green. One of the last duels in England had been fought on the village green, between the squire and a wealthy traveller who both fancied the same serving wench. Neither of them got her. They were both fatally wounded, and for thirty years or so (until the incident became romantic, quaint, something to be proud of), the affair was hushed up.

There was some reference to "Greg," who was not present. (So there were more of them.) And glances were cast at Snow White when he was mentioned, puzzling glances which I couldn't fathom.

Snow White and the giants, I thought. 'Snow White is the fairest in the land.' She had blue-black hair, too. Snow White, dwarf among giants.

Watching as casually as I could, I noticed something else.

Nobody smoked. And nobody drank beer.

It makes sense not to start smoking now that we know what we know. But could you get sixteen sensible kids all in one group?

As for the beer question . . . Quite a few of the youngsters had soft drinks. Others had what looked like cocktails, sherry, port, whisky, rum. Obviously they were not teetotallers.

Out of sixteen campers, surely at least three or four would drink beer on a hot summer evening?

I had finished my beer again. It was a small moment of crisis. Was I to walk boldy up to Snow White and the giants and say: "All is discovered. You are not what you seem," or buy another beer and stay quietly watching them?

I did neither. I stood up to go.

And as I stood up, Snow White glanced at me and recognized me. I saw it in her face, although the moment after recognition she looked casually around as if she'd merely been giving the place the once-over.

But I knew I wasn't mistaken.

One thing was certain -- that expression, half startled, half interested, had not come over her face simply became she had seen me in the upstairs window of the Red Lion. For one thing, I hadn't seen her look up. For another, it wasn't just an I've-seen-you-before-somewhere expression.

She knew me. She hadn't expected to see me, but the moment she did, she thought at once: 'That's Val Mathers . . . ' and a lot more,

I wished I knew what the lot more was.

I'd certainly have gone over and spoken to her, but for the fifteen giants. You don't use the "Haven't we met before?" routine when the girl has fifteen friends with her.

Instead, I went home.

As I closed the garage door after driving home, Dina rushed up to me. She was still in her Cinderella dress, but her arms and legs were swathed in bandages which she had obviously put on herself.

"She hit me," Dina panted. "She hit me and scratched me and threw me out."

"Now, Dina -- " I began.

"She got in through a window and pushed me and hit me and scratched me, pulled my hair and I couldn't stay in the summerhouse."

"Forget it, Dina," I said wearily.

"It was her fault I couldn't keep iny promise. She -- "

"Dina, I'm not interested," I said firmly. "You knew there was a man working in the house. You knew he had to get into your room and the summerhouse later. There was no need for any trouble if you'd done as you were told."

"I do what you tell me, don't I? You told me to stay in the summerhouse, only she wouldn't let me."

At that moment Sheila came round the front of the house. She looked at me uncertainly, ready to explain, or fight, or refuse to say anything, depending on my attitude.

"Dina," I said, "go and get dressed."

"Aren't you going to -- "

"I'm not going to do anything. Go and get dressed. Now. And no argument."

Hurt, Dina not only went but stayed in her room the rest of the evening, sulking.

Sheila and I had an unusually pleasant evening on our own for once. I opened a bottle of Rüdesheimer and then a bottle of Niersteiner, and we got pleasantly merry.

At last I thought the circumstances were right, and told Sheila that Jota was coming back to Shuteley.

They weren't right enough. Sheila's face set hard and she said: "For how long?"

"He didn't say."

"He's not staying here."

"No. He's going to ask Gil -- "

"If he visits this house, I'll stay in my room till he's gone."

"Sheila, he promised -- "

" He promised," she said fiercely. She stood up and began to prowl about, clenching and unclenching her hands. Sheila didn't often hit the roof, but when she did she was inclined to go right through it. "I never told you why I was so wild that time, Val. Not because Jota made a pass at me. If a man like him never made a pass at me, I'd know I'd better take up tatting. Not even because he used your trust to get me in a situation where those horrible things could happen . . . But because when you came back, when you walked in on that . . . "

She had worked herself up to such a pitch that for the moment she couldn't go on. Her color was high, her chest was heaving, and I thought it was a long time since I had seen her look so marvellous.

Of course I'd never forget that time when I found Jota quite crudely trying to rape my wife. It had been horrible and it had been incredible. I'd always thought, not so much that Jota would never touch Sheila because she was my wife as that if he did feel it coming on, he'd tell me. "Val, I want Sheila. I'm going to have her." That was Jota's way. I'd been afraid of that.

I'd never thought for a moment it would happen the way it did -- Jota, having got me out of the way by a brazen lie, which I discovered only because the person I was going to see happened to meet me in the street, fighting coarsely with his best friend's wife, his cousin's wife, like a sex criminal.

Sheila, under control again, broke into my thoughts. "You were surprised, weren't you?" she said.

That was an understatement. "I couldn't believe it," I said. "But when I did, I -- "

"Yes, we're not talking about that. That was all right. You threw him about so effiently I was quite cheered up. Never thought you could do that son of thing, Val. I was proud of you then. And I didn't mind seeing Jota hurt, not in the slightest. That bit of it was fine . . . Let's go back a bit. You were surprised."

I waited uneasily, vaguely sensing what she was getting at.

"You were surprised became I was fighting," Sheila said. "You were astonished because I was being half killed and still went on resisting. You were certain that Jota merely had to cast a lustful eye on any girl, and she'd immediately surrender with a sense of profound gratitude."

It was true, but I couldn't admit it. "I never said -- "

"Val, I know perfectly well what you never said. I also know what you did say. Afterwards, when we had to talk, when we had to pretend to be civilized again and work out whether Jota was to be charged with assault, or what -- that's when you gave yourself away: All you were concerned with was Jota. He had to promise. He_ had to go away. _He_ was the one to be convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that nothing remotely like that must ever happen again. And when he accepted all that, you were satisfied."

I just looked back at her.

"Nothing about me," she said bleakly. "You couldn't trust me. If Jota tried again, next time I'd obviously leap into his arms -- "

"I never said -- "

"Oh, Val, who cares what you never said? Your whole attitude made it a hundred per cent clear. Jota was the one to handle somehow. I didn't matter at all. Whatever Jota decided was as good as done. You had to work on Jota. I was merely a pawn in the game, if that."

I couldn't argue convincingly, because she was working a vein of truth. No girl ever said no to Jota. No girl ever could, whoever she was, whatever the circumstances. And it was entirely correct that my surprise on that horrible night had been due largely to Sheila's desperate resistance. I frankly couldn't understand that. It wasn't as if Sheila and I were all that close, even then. Why had a girl who had never resisted me resist Jota?

A diversion was available. "Why did you wait two years to tell me this?" I asked.

She sighed and sat down, crossing her legs. All the fire had gone out of her. She wasn't going through the roof this time. "Some things you can't take back, not ever, even if you want to. Two years ago, we might have been on the threshold of a great new understanding . . . Now we know we weren't. You won't have children, though I ache for them. And Dina's getting worse every day."

I was grateful to her for phrasing the problem of Dina like that. "Dina's getting worse every day." If she'd wanted to be venomous, there were a thousand other things she could have said about Dina, seven hundred of them not unjust.

"Sheila," I said, "I like you."

She smiled faintly. "I know. You couldn't quite say 'love,' because you're being sincere tonight. And then, I put you off your stroke earlier when I stopped you saying 'honey.' You'll never call me 'honey' again. You'll be careful, cautious, like a good insurance manager, and from now on you'll call Dina Dina and me Sheila."

There wasn't much to say to that, so I went for a brief stroll round the house.

Remembering Dina's story about fairies in the wood, I walked down the garden, not expecting to see anything at all.

The river Shute, meandering tortuously across flat country and through woods, half enclosed our house in the inner walls of a W bend. As far as I knew the house had never been flooded, though the river had been known to reach the garden.

Behind our garden, in the apex of the W, was a small patch of trees and scrub which would have been very popular with courting couples but for the fact that they couldn't get into it. The river curved round it, and on the land side the only entry was through our garden. And we had high, thick hedges.

It was a piece of wasteland which was of no use to anybody. The local landowner had tried to sell it to us, but we didn't want it. Anyway, as Dina had said with childish shrewdness: "Why buy it when it's ours anyway?"

At the fence at the bottom of the garden I stopped.

Was it imagination, or was there a faint glow in the copse?

It wasn't a fire, there was no moon, and it could hardly be fairies -- though I now understood Dina's story. To her, what else could a glow in the copse at night mean but fairies?

I climbed the fence and advanced slowly.

The glow was very faint and would never have been noticed on a night which was not completely dark. The odd thing about it was, it didn't seem to have a source. There was nothing but the glow. I walked through it, stood in the middle of it, looked in all directions, and there was nothing but a faint blue radiance.

I ran back to the fence, climbed it and hurried back to the house.

Sheila was in the bedroom, in a shortie nightdress (in this extraordinary summer, most people wore less than that at night), about to go to bed. We had left a very important discussion hanging in the air. But this was something I had to share with somebody, and Sheila was my wife.

"Sheila," I said breathlessly, "I want you to come and look at something outside."

"Where? Not in the garden, for heaven's sake?"

"In the copse."

She laughed in protest. "Like this?"

"It'll cool you down. And no one can see."

On the point of protesting further, she saw I was deadly serious and realized it would probably be quicker in the end to humor me than to argue with me. She put on shoes and we went down the garden.

I was afraid it was going to be like those frustrating incidents in detective stories where the hero takes the cops to the murder apartment, only to find the body's gone, the signs of a struggle have been removed, and even the bloodstains have vanished.

However, as I helped Sheila over the fence she saw the glow and suddenly became reluctant to go further because she thought there was something instead of because she thought there wasn't.

"What is it?" she whispered, making no move forward.

"I don't know. YoU do see it?"

"Of course I see it. But what is it?"

After a moment or two she came further into the copse with me, and together we tried all the things I had already tried alone -- looking among the branches for the source of the light, at the sky through the leaves, at the still river beyond, under the bushes.

Sheila's reaction was exactly the opposite of mine. The less I understood the glow, the more I wanted to find out about it. More practically, perhaps, Sheila satisfied herself that it was a mystery and was then quite prepared to give up.

"Well, we've looked," she said reasonably. "There's nothing else to see. Whatever it is, it's staying put. Let's go to bed and look in the morning."

And that's what we did. I wasn't sorry, though, that I'd made Sheila come and look. I wasn't imagining things. There was a radiance in the wood with no source.

Later, Sheila wanted to talk about something, but it wasn't the radiance.

"I did hurt her, Val," she said, watching me. "I'm bigger than she is and a lot stronger. I thought, well, after all, she's a naughty kid and she needs a lesson. I meant to beat her up and I thought it was going to be fun, like that time when . . . "

She stopped, and although I had followed her thought I said nothing. She was thinking of that other time when I had thrown Jota all over the place, fighting mad, hardly knowing what I was doing, and Sheila had watched and been quite happy about it, because it was me who was doing the throwing and Jota who was being thrown, and because of what had happened before that.

But Dina wasn't quite the same.

"It didn't work?" I said.

"No."

"I didn't think it would."

"Well . . . don't you mind? Was I terribly wrong to . . . to do what I did?"

"I don't know. I don't suppose so. When any kid's on the wrong track you talk to him, try to persuade him; and I guess if you don't try giving him a good hiding you're missing a bet . . . But you can't beat sense into Dina."

"But you don't mind?" Sheita insisted.

"I don't see that it's anything to do with me," I said.

When we got to bed, more friendly toward each other than for a long time, I thought it would be a good idea to do something about it. But nothing happened, and Sheila made no move, merely saying "Good night" in a tone which seemed to contain finality. So a chance was lost, like a thousand others.

Chapter Three

Before breakfast next morning I was back in the wood. Sheila didn't come with me. She said that if I found anything I could tell her and she'd take my word for it.

I found absolutely nothing. The copse was exactly as it had always been, and in daylight no radiance could be detected. By the time it occurred to me to look for footprints or other signs that people might have been there recently, I'd done so much stamping around that the search was futile. Besides, hardly anything grew under the trees, and the thick, springy leaf-mold did not retain tracks well.

When I got back, Sheila merely said: "It must have been some kind of natural phosphorescence. One egg or two?"

"Phosphorescence has a source, like any other light," I insisted.

"Well, look again tonight. I wonder if Dina will be down in the next ten minutes? It's no use calling her, of course."

Nobody at the office mentioned any unusual incidents the day before. Being the boss, I didn't hear the gossip. If Sally Henrey, my secretary, hadn't been on holiday I could have asked her about the morning's topics. Wilma Shelly, who was standing in for her, was too junior for me to confide in her.

I wasn't a confident boss. I was efficient, of course, or I'd never have reached my present position. But I didn't possess the sheer self-assurance that every good boss has to have, the feeling that he's a boss by right, the unquestioning, unquestioned conviction that things will always be done his way, the right way, the only way.

After an hour's correspondence there was a lull, and I considered phoning Gil Carswell. But Gil, far less self-confident than me, had not become the boss, and I didn't like to call him at the bank unless the matter was really urgent. That was why I'd sent the message the day before by a girl who had to go to the bank anyway. Gil was terrified of the bank manager, who had always seemed singularly inoffensive. But then, Gil was terrified of everybody and everything.

While I was still thinking about Gil, the phone rang. Aloud I muttered: "Oh, God, not Dina again."

It was Jota. "I'm at London Airport," he said. "Be with you this afternoon sometime. Have you seen Gil since I phoned yesterday?"

"No, but I sent him a message."

Jota chuckled. "Of course. Mustn't disturb him at the bank. The manager would chew his ears off . . . at any rate, such desperate liberties must never be taken. By the way, is anything happening in Shuteley?"

"What would happen in ShuteleyT' I said cautiously, wondering if by any chance he'd heard anything.

He hadn't. "As you say. Silly question."

"As a matter of fact," I said, "there is something going on. Maybe just a small thing, but something . . . No, don't ask questions. Wait till you get here."

"You intrigue me . . . Something happening in Shuteley seems like a contradiction in terms. But I can wait. Oh . . . how did Sheila take the great news that I was coming back?"

"Unenthusiastically," I said.

He chuckled again. "Don't worry. I promised. If you remember, I never promised before."

He rang off.

That was technically true, that he had never promised not to make a pass at Sheila. I wondered, however, if anyone but Jota would have considered such a thing worth saying. You weren't morally entitled to stab a man in the back because you'd never promised not to.

As I hung up, Wilma came in. She was breathless and rather indignant. "Mr. Mathers, there's a young man insisting on seeing you, and nobody but you. He looks like a camper, and he's . . . well, the things he's been saying to the girls -- "

"Send him in," I said. "Right away."

She looked surprised; but said nothing and went out.

The door opened again and a young Goliath entered. He wore a white T-shirt and shorts and was obviously one of the giants, probably the biggest of them all. I judged him to be six feet seven.

He had not been one of the giants with Snow White at The Copper Beech.

"Val Mathers?" he said, advancing with outstretched hand. "I'm John Smith."

"Really?" I said politely.

"No, not really, if you insist, but it's as fair a name as any, isn't it?"

"You wouldn't by any chance be Greg, would you?"

He dropped his hand. He was not pleased.

"How in fisk do you know that?" he snarled.

Not pressing my luck, I said: "Where's your camp, Greg?"

For a moment he simmered, and then decided to be friends again.

"In a bend on the river about a mile upstream."

I knew the place. It was three-quarters of a mile beyond my house, on the other side of the river, the north side.

He sat down without invitation, looked at me expectantly and said nothing.

He was blond, very goodlooking, perhaps nineteen or twenty. His accent puzzled me a little. It was not foreign, his speech was very clear, and yet I had never heard anyone speak quite like him. I had not missed those two words "fair" and "fisk." The natural thing to say would have been "as good a name as any," and "fisk" seemed to be a cuss word.

There was nothing strange about his shirt and shorts and shoes except that they fitted better than clothes generally do and looked as if they had just that moment been put on, brand new. But for the giants that was nothing strange.

He was completely at ease, and I was therefore puzzled by his easy manner and sudden silence -- as if he expected me to tell him why he'd come.

"Well, Mr. Smith?" I prompted. "Or Greg, as you like?"

"I want to insure against catastrophe in Shuteley during the next twenty-four hours," he said coolly.

"Catastrophe?" I said.

"Catastrophe."

"In the next ~twenty-four hours?"

"In the next twenty-four hours. You're remarkably up on the quicktake, Val."

There were lots of openings. I chose one. "You can't do business under a false or incomplete name. John Smith won't do. Greg won't do."

For a moment, for the second time, his eyes gleamed with a feral light, and I knew that this man was dangerous. He didn't like to be balked. Despite his easy manner, he was liable at any moment to become an animal. A huge, dangerous animal.

I tried another opening. "We can always supply better rates for particular contingencies. If you wanted to insure against flood, say -- "

He grinned, all easiness and friendliness again. "Flood's unlikely, isn't it? They tell me the river's never been lower."

"Catastrophe in twenty-four hours in Shuteley," I said, "is unlikely. Another thing, Greg -- you're over twenty-one?"

"What about it?"

"If you're not, there are difficulties."

"Do you sell insurance or not?"

"I don't sell insurance, Greg. I arrange it, if it seems to be to the mutual advantage of both parties. Now, let's see -- you want to insure, Greg? But you don't live in Shuteley."

"No."

"And -- in the next twenty-four hours?"

"We're only going to be here twenty-four hours," he said simply, "give or take an hour or two."

"What sort of sum have you in mind?"

"Nothing most. A million pounds, maybe. Perhaps two million."

It was time, I thought, to restore sanity to the conversation. "I'm afraid such a transaction would hardly be practicable," I said. "Although in theory insurance against any contingency is possible, such as rain on a certain day, failure of a crop, or delay in a certain delivery, there are always difficulties in definition, and it takes time to work out policy conditions. It would be quite impossible to draw up a policy within the time specified, to operate . . . "

Greg was laughing, a great roaring bellow of amusement that rattled the windows. "Val, you sound like an old man," he said.

"You're not really serious about this at all, are you?" I said thoughtfully.

He stopped laughing at once. "No. It was just an idea. Quite a most idea, really . . . but as you say, hardly practicable. I just wondered what you'd say."

"Who is the girl," I said abruptly, "whose dress disappears?"

Unsurprised, he answered: "All of them, when they wear Luxon."

"Luxon?"

"Well, you see, the idea is . . . it's one of those feminine paradoxes, arising out of the curious way women think . . . If you're wearing a dress, a perfectly decent dress, and bits of it disappear at times, that's all right. Nothing indecent about it, became it only seems to disappear. It's really there all the time."

"Why does nobody drink beer?"

"We don't like the taste. And it's grossing." ' ú

"Grossing?"

"Fattening."

"Greg, where do you come from?"

"Here."

"Here? Maybe. But here isn't Shuteley."

"Here," he repeated blandly.

"What's this about a duel?"

Again I had disconcerted and angered him. The red animal light flashed in his eyes.

"Nothing about a duel," he said shortly. "And what do you know about it, anyway? No, never mind."

He stood up and moved to the door. "Sorry you won't do a deal, Val," he said over his shoulder, his composure restored. "But as you guessed, I didn't really think you would. By the way, you know Gil Carswell, don't you?"

"Yes, but how -- "

"And Clarence Mulliner?"

"Yes. In fact -- "

"In fact, he'll arrive here at 3:10."

He closed the door quietly behind him.

Gil called me from the bank, for the first time ever, and said: "Val, I want to see you fight away. Come out for a drink."

"All right," I said. "See you in The Copper Beech."

"That chrome-plated morgue?"

"There won't be anybody there."

"I see. Right. In five minutes."

I left the office at once to walk to The Copper Beech.

At the door Tommy grabbed my lapels in his eagerness to tell me something. "She just passed again, Mr. Mathers. If you hurry you'll catch up with her."

"Thanks, Tommy," I said, released myself and went out into the mid-morning sun.

Fifty yards ahead was the girl in the pink suit. Although I could see only her back, there was no doubt whatever that she was Snow White. Her slim, smoothly rolling hips were only one of the assets of a one-in-a-million shape to go with her one-in-a-million face; it would have been a crime to cover legs like hers with the sheerest nylons.

One small surprise: I wouldn't have expected such a girl to wear the same outfit two days running.

Since she was alone this time, I'd have hurried after her and stopped her. But it wasn't necessary. Glancing over her shoulder she saw me, and making no pretense that she didn't know me from Adam, stopped and leaned against a lamp standard to wait for me.

As I approached, her shoulders were suddenly bare. This time I saw more clearly what happened, when it happened. Out of the corner of my eye I still saw the lower part of her jacket and her skirt. It was as if my gaze had burned a hole in her clothes.

There were a few people in the street, and some of them were staring. For the most part, however, they seemed to be pretending that they hadn't noticed anything. (This was Shuteley.)

When I was ten feet away Snow White's jacket was complete again, but her skirt was abbreviated to playsuit length. Then she wore the whole suit again except for a large circular cut-out round her navel.

Cut-out wasn't quite the right word. Material and flesh merged into each other like candlelight and shadows.

More than her blue-black hair had made me think of her as Snow White. Her flesh all over -- and by this time I'd seen quite a lot of it, in aggregate -- was pale and creamy, and in this summer that was a rare achievement. None of the giants was pale. Every one of them was tanned, some lightly, some quite heavily.

She was with the giants but not of them.

I stopped. "Hello," I said.

She smiled.

"I'm Val Mathers," I said, "as I suspect you know very well."

I scored a point with this. Her eyes widened, and she asked: "What makes you say that?"

"You recognized me in the bar last night."

She nodded, admitting it. But she added nothing, admitting no more.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Miranda."

"Just Miranda?"

Her suit, oddly enough, was not changing any more. Perhaps what one saw depended on the angle of vision. Moved by a spirit of experiment, I stretched out my hand to touch her waist . . .

. . . She struck my hand hard, though without malice. "Wait for an invitation," she said coolly, and turned and walked away, to my disappointment. I had expected more from the encounter.

From the back, like the other girl, she wore perfectly normal clothes.

I found Gil in The Copper Beech. Although the lounge was not as empty as it had been the previous evening, only half a dozen people were there.

We sat in the corner where the campers had sat the evening before, and we had it to ourselves.

Gil and I were the same height and weight, and at one time had resembled one another. Now he had thick glasses and a permanent leave-me-alone frown, and I hoped I didn't look remotely like him.

Gil could have done anything. That is, he had the theoretical ability to do almost anything. In practice he had achieved nothing and never would.

Being sensitive myself, I understood him better than anyone else except possibly Barbara. But nobody could do anything for him. He couldn't do anything for himself.

The slightest criticism, the merest breath of condemnation, even meant as a jest, deeply wounded him. He was a bleeder. Scratch him, and he bled for days. If he made a genuine mistake, it took him a month to recover from it. But it didn't even have to be genuine. Someone merely had to hint that something, anything he'd done was a stupid thing to do, and he'd start to bleed slowly, silently.

Of course he defended himself. He spent his life and all his vast potential defending himself against attack, when he wasn't being attacked.

I was nearly as sorry for him as for myself. What was the use of being a near-genius when a casual remark by an office-boy could mean a month of misery for you?

Gil had married Barbara, another moody genius, who sketched and sculpted and wrote poetry and flatly refused ever to go further than five miles from the village green. She had roots, apparently.

"What do you know, Val?" Gil asked abruptly, when the waitress had brought our beers. "What do you think is going on?"

I took out a penny. "Let's toss for first innings," I said. Gil lost, and I put him in first.

"A gang of kids have been hanging round the house," he said. "They seem very interested in Garry."

Garry was Gil's two-year-old son. He was an only child and was going to remain so for two excellent reasons. Barbara couldn't have any more children, and neither -- as he had told me one moresely drunken night when we were both feeling sorry for ourselves -- could Gil.

"Can I have Dina?" he asked. "She'd be company for Barbara."

So that was it. "Jota's coming," I reminded him. "And he wants to stay with you."

"With us?" Gil was astonished. "You've got a great big house. We only have . . . "

He stopped.

They had an outside lavatory. The wooden stairs up to their flat were so worn that they looked as if they'd been carved curved. The floors creaked and were uneven . . . when houses had been revalued a year or two back, nearly everybody's valuation, including ours, was doubled, at least. Gil's had been halved -- human beings weren't supposed to live in such conditions any more.

Although as a bank clerk Gil didn't make a great deal of money, others in his position, married with one child, managed to live far, more comfortably. But neither Gil nor Barbara was remotely practical. They bought things they thought they needed, but didn't. They didn't buy things they did need.

"We can manage, I suppose," he said stiffly.

"You still want Dina?"

"Yes. I have to go to work, and Barbara's nervous."

"Dina won't be much help."

Gil shrugged impatiently. He was always impatient when anyone didn't instantly understand him, even though he had not supplied all the essential information.

"I don't think they mean any harm, the kids. Maybe they won't even come back. It's just that Barbara's alone in the house all day . . . I thought of Dina because she doesn't go out much. And if Jota's there . . . "

He let that hang, and I didn't take it off the hook. As far as we knew Jota had only once broken trust with either of us in that particular way. Gil knew what had happened -- Sheila had said something to Barbara. The idea of Jota making a pass at Barbara seemed fantastic to me, but it probably didn't seem so fantastic to Gil.

"All right," I said. "I'll ask her."

Rather surprisingly, Dina got on quite well with both Gil and Barbara. Moody geniuses don't like competition or criticism, and Dina never gave them any.

We said no more about Jota. Barbara would cling to Dina, and away from me, away from Sheila (whom she really trusted in a peculiar way) Dina would stick to the one person she knew.

"There's something else about those kids," Gil said. "They came into the bank and changed some money. Silver into notes. I was the only one to notice a certain very strange thing, and for some reason I didn't point it out to anyone else."

Gil felt in his pocket and produced two half-crowns, two florins, two shillings. He made no comment, so I examined them.

It wasn't hard to get the point. The half-crowns were both fairly shiny, dated 1961. The florins were old and worn, dated 1935. The shillings were dated 1952.

"I see what you mean," I said.

"Do you?" He sounded skeptical. Gil, with his inflated IQ, could never believe that anyone else had more capacity for putting two and two together than . . . well, Dina.

I looked more closely, One half-crown had an infinitesimal scratch across the Queen's hair. So had the other. The milling on the florins was identical, particularly worn just below the date.

"There were a lot more of these?"

"Yes."

"Any notes?" I asked.

"No. Well?"

He was challenging me to reach his own conclusion.

I said: "I know why you didn't point this out."

"Do you?"

"They must be forgeries, of course. Forgeries so good they'd be hard to detect, and won't ever be detected now that they're mixed with other coins and the duplication isn't significant. Notes weren't forged, or duplicated, because the numbers would eventually give them away."

Gil nodded with reluctant respect. "And why didn't I point it out?"

"Because you're responsible. This might mean trouble. If you let it go, it can't possibly mean trouble."

"Clever," he sneered. "Now tell me why it was done."

"They needed money, so they made it," I said.

He sniffed, but didn't pursue the topic. Instead, he said: "Tell me what you know."

I told him. I came last to the brief encounter with Miranda.

His eyes gleamed.

"The ultimate in provocation," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Could it be simpler? The impact of any outfit any girl wears lasts about five minutes. After she's taken off her jacket and you see the lowest low-cut neckline you ever saw, after you've had a good look, she might as well put the jacket on."

I must have looked unimpressed for he went on in a torrent of words to develop the theme.

"Does anybody stare at the Grammar School senior girls in their little white pants, except wistful old men? But let them put on skirts and ride bicycles in a breeze . . . A pretty girl peels to a bikinl, and every man on the beach stares. For a while. Then she puts on a beach wrap, leaves it unfastened, and they stare again every time it falls open."

"I never thought of that," I said.

He gaped at me. "You never thought of it? Ten minutes after viewing the delectable Miranda you've just been describing?"

"I was too busy doubting my own sanity. But I see what you mean now."

And I did. Successful strippers don't just take their clothes off. They tantalize, And what could be more tantalizing than a luxon dress? What greater inducement to look could there be than not knowing what you're liable to see?

Gil had hit on a good phrase -- 'the ultimate in provocation.'

Current fashion wasn't anywhere near the ultimate in provocation. Indeed, with untidy, too-long hair, tight jeans and loose sweaters, long pointed flat shoes, unnatural makeup and too-short skirts on the wrong girls, teenage glamour had never hit a lower low.

This kind of thing was nothing remotely like current fashion.

"Where are they from?" I murmured. "Outer space?"

The complete absence of reaction showed that I was not expressing any idea completely new to Gil. And he was the most confirmed skeptic in Shuteley . . .

I had meant to go home for lunch and ask Dina if she'd like to go and stay with the Carswells for a while, but I hadn't phoned Sheila to warn her, and it was just as well.

As I left the office, Miranda fell into step with me and asked: "Care to buy me lunch?"

It was a question that needed no answer.

I took her to the Red Lion, partly through lack of choice and partly because the idea of sitting opposite her in a stall all to ourselves was anything but unattractive.

She was not wearing the pink suit. She wore a silvery gray dress that didn't disappear, and she was still sensational.

She must, if the camp was the giants only base, have gone straight there and come straight back.

As we sat down, I said: "I waited."

"For what?"

"An invitation."

She smiled a faint smile and said: "This is a different kind of invitation."

"What are you going to tell me, Miranda?" I asked.

"Why are you so sure I'm going to tell you anything?"

"Because the only reasons you could have for being here with me now are to tell me something or ask me something -- and I have a feeling that I couldn't tell you much you don't know."

"There could be another."

"Such as?"

"Interest in you. I might be curious what you're like. Anyway -- what would you like to know?"

"Where do you and your friends come from?"

"Here," she said, as Greg had done.

The waitress interrupted us then, and when she left with our order Miranda moved back a square.

"I'll tell you one reason why I wanted to lunch with you, if you like."

"Why?"

"I want you to introduce me to Jota."

I might have guessed. In this crazy business, one thing could be expected to be unchanged -- that Snow White would instantly be drawn to the prince.

"What do you know about Jota?" I said.

She merely smiled and shrugged.

"Greg called him Clarence Mulliner," I observed.

She sat up quickly. "Greg? When were you talking to Greg?"

"This morning. He came to see me."

She was angry, I saw, and perhaps afraid. It was an excellent chance, and I hoped I'd be able to take it. The possibility that I might be able to play Snow White against Giant No. 1 had not until that moment occurred to me.

The less I said, and the more Miranda said, the better.

"What did he want?" she asked sharply.

"Amusement, I suppose. He wanted to insure against catastrophe here in Shuteley in the next twenty-four hours."

"The vandal," she breathed.

"Vandal?" That was interesting. It hadn't eccurred to me that Greg might be trying to insure against disaster and then cause it.

"You wouldn't understand."

"Of course not. I understand very little."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude."

And then, with a baffling switch that took the wind out of my sails, she smiled and said: "It doesn't matter anyway. Greg's a fool, a dangerous, megalomaniac, irresponsible fool . . . but it doesn't matter."

Rallying, I said: "Why not? Because we don't matter? Because we don't live in the same country as you? The same world? The same dimension? The same time?"

Most inopportunely, the waitress brought our soup (brown windsor, of course).

When she had gone, I asked: "How old are you, Miranda?"

I got the smile again, and nothing else.

Possibly, I thought, she was many, many years older than she looked. This close, I had an opportunity to see that the flawlessness common to all the young strangers was absolute. I don't mean that they were all handsome or beautiful. But like Miranda, they had no hair out of place, no scars, no scratches, perfect teeth, perfectly manicured hands. In the heat of a summer day, she didn't sweat. She appeared to have no makeup on, yet I was sure she had. Right through history, women had gilded the lily. Even in a different history, I was sure they would do the same.

I asked her: "Are you wearing makeup?"

"Yes."

Her gray dress was at the same time unremarkable and scarcely possible. No creases or marks. Its fit was several degrees beyond currently known perfection.

Ordinary dresses worn by ordinary girls weren't like Miranda's. Either the machinery showed, or the absence of machinery.

"You can't," I said thoughtfully, "be wearing a bra."

"No."

"Then how . . . ?" Well, romantic myth aside, women needed something to provide the shape they wanted.

"Selective tension," she said easily. "Different degrees of elasticity in different places."

And at sight of my expression, she laughed for the first time.

She stopped when I said: "You do come from the future."

"Listen;" she said. "I'll tell you one thing, and it's the truth. Then we'll talk about something else. We come from the present , and we come from here ."

"Yet you say 'come,'" I answered quickly.

A flicker in her eyes registered appreciation of the point. Since she didn't reply, I pursued: "Another dimension, then?"

"Dimension?" she said. "What's that?"

I tried to convey my own rather fuzzy idea of the theory of co-existent worlds. She seemed interested.

"This is only a theory?" she asked. "There's no proof?"

"None. But you might know whether it's more than a theory, I think."

The faint smile again. "Now," she said firmly, "we'll talk about you." After a pause she added: "And Jota."

"No," I said. Although I'd had my chance, and lost it, I might get it back. "We'll talk about Greg. And you."

I had lost it. She had regained her control. She wasn't going to ask what had happened between Greg and me. She wouldn't discuss it.

So I told her about Jota and Gil and me. Every time I tried to turn the conversation back to her and the giants, she promptly turned it back. I told her briefly about Sheila, but not about Dina or Mary.

Only three times, briefly, did the talk swerve from the path along which Miranda was casually driving it.

The first time, after telling her about the days when Jota, Gil and I were the Terrible Three, I asked what she and her friends called themselves. She thought for a minute and then said: "Well, what would you call us? Any ideas?"

"Snow White and the giants."

She stared and laughed rather uncertainly. She thought she ought to know what I was talking about, but didn't. She was off balance, so I said:

"Greg said 'as fair as any,' instead of 'as good as any.' He said 'how in fisk' . . . ?"

Miranda iumped, nearly spilling gravy over herself.

"I presumed," I said casually, "that meant something like 'how in hell.'"

"It means rather more than that," said Miranda. "There are sexual connotations."

"I'm not surprisecL He said 'up on the quicktake.'"

Miranda was silent.

"A simple mistake," I went on, "if you read a phrase in a book. Quick on the uptake. Up on the quicktake. Unimportant . . . except that nobody born between 1860 and 1960 could say such a thing . . . Then there was 'most,' apparently a term of general approbation. 'Grossing,' meaning fattening. I may have missed a few."

"Greg is careless," said Miranda. "Very careless."

"And you're not, I noticed. Except in wearing a luxon suit."

"I won't do it again."

"Pity."

The second time was when the sweet came up. I asked about the food, and she said, in slight surprise: "It's only food," and though she instantly turned the conversation again, I was left with another strange impression: Miranda and the giants ate and drank as we stoked a fire or filled an oil heater. It had to be done, but the quality of the fuel, so long as it came up to certain minimum standards, was immaterial.

The last time was when we left. As she stood up I noticed something I'd have seen before if I'd been reasonably observant. She carried no handbag, and she had no pockets.

"Where do you carry things?" I asked.

"What things?"

"Money, cosmetics, a handkerchief, keys -- that sort of thing."

"Why would I need them?" she asked mildly.

We had emerged into bright sunlight. It was as hot as usual.

"Thanks for the lunch, Val," Miranda said. "I'll see you later."

And she strode off so abruptly that even to attempt to detain her I'd have had to shout or run after her.

From the way she walked, I knew she could run faster than I could.

Looking after her, I decided that Miranda, in her way, was as careless as she thought Greg was. True, it was a different way.

We had lunched together, man and girl. And we might have been robots.

Certainly some apparently personal things had been said. I'd said a lot. I had acted more or less like a human being.

But Miranda . . .

Everything she had said and done she might have said and done from ten thousand miles and ten thousand years away.

"You don't really believe it, do you?" Gil sneered. A sneer was the only way to describe it. Where anyone else would have expressed polite surprise, Gil's reaction was incredulity that anyone could be so stupid, even you.

"I do," I said.

"You mean one of these -- giants tells you Jota will arrive at 3:10, and you expect him on the dot?"

I looked at my watch. It was eight after three.

"You can believe what you like, Gil," I said. "But these giants are no ordinary kids. I've been trying to figure out how Miranda was able to make me talk like that an hour or so ago, without ever letting the conversation get more than two or three degrees above absolute zero, and now I see it. She knew the questions to ask."

Gil started to say something, but I hadn't finished. "Maybe Greg meant Jota would arrive in Shuteley at 3:10 exactly, he didn't say. But I think he meant here. I think he meant that wherever I was, whether I went home or stayed in the Red Lion or came back here, Jota would walk in at 3:10."

"Of all the fatuous, ridiculous, superstitious . . . " Gil began.

He'd probably have found quite a few more adjectives before he had to cap them with a noun. But just then the door opened.

I'd given instructions for anyone who called on me after three to be sent straight in. That was why Miranda found it so easy.

"Why look surprised?" she said. "I told you I wanted you to introduce me to Jota.'

"I'm surprised," I observed, "that you should consider an introduction necessary. You didn't with me."

She smiled and turned to Gil. "Hello, Gil," she said. "Has Garry's flush gone yet?"

Although Gil didn't answer, I could see he was startled. Garry evidently had had a flush, and it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that there was no apparent way for the giants to know about it.

Miranda sat down, primly arranging her skirt the way girls do (though I suspected she had had to practice ). And the very instant that she turned and looked at the door, Jota came in.

He had never been handsome. I never knew any lady-killer who was really goodlooking. Women seem to go for men of the oddest shapes and sizes. Jota had a long nose, very deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks and black hair nearly, but not quite, as dark as Miranda's. He was tall and very thin. He looked like a fanatic or visionary, and this impression wasn't wrong, though fanaticism was only part of his complex makeup.

He didn't look at Gil or me. He went straight to Miranda, took her hand gently and pulled her to her feet and said, from his nine-inch advantage in height: "You're exquisite."

"I know," said Mirand~ coolly. "But thanks for noticing."

"Your name must be Venus."

"If you say so," said Miranda.

There was a lot more of this, and I realized as I watched that Jota, for only the second time, was annoying me far more than Gil ever could.

It's strange about old friends, people you know from way back -- you've forgotten long ago whether you like them or not. The question has ceased to be relevant.

Gil, now . . . He had not made a friend in the last fifteen years. He would die without making another friend. He had become an amalgam of armor and anger and acid and antagonism, a fortress on an island that no army would ever want to storm. On the mainland, they'd march past the defenses against nothing with scarcely a derisive smile.

Only Jota and I (and Barbara, in a different but not warmer way) would ever put up with Gil.

Jota . . . I had admired and envied him. He had done and was still doing many things I wished I could do, and his amatory success was the least of these. He was, after all, a Jack of all trades (even if master of none). There was nothing he couldn't turn his hand to. He had the courage or selfishness or brute insensitiveness to do what he liked and invariably get away with it. Most people treat you as your own attitude and expectation invites them to treat you. And Jota got what he wanted -- whatever it was. Always. Everywhere.

I had had every right to object when Jota's roving eye lighted on Sheila. I had no right to object when Miranda caught his eye, but I did.

Surprisingly, the meeting was brought to order by Miranda. She suddenly said: "I must be going," and walked out as abruptly as she had left me outside the Red Lion.

"That girl," said Jota, "fills me with a quite irresistible desire to see that dark head on a white pillow. It will not be resisted. Now -- what's going on?"

He hadn't changed. He had never, I suspected, been in love; he had a completely mistaken idea of what love was. Stumbling and imperfect as our connubial relations were, I believed that both Gil and I knew far more about love than Jota would have learned by the time he died.

Although a great deal of his time and too much of his energy were expended on women, he was always able to dismiss them completely as he did now. Once or twice, long ago, I had heard him make passionate word-love to a girl whom he knew, in the Biblical sense, make another date with her, and then say cheerfully, the moment she was gone: "Thank God that's the last I'll see of that cow."

He heard our side of the story first. He wanted it that way, and things were generally done Jota's way.

Gil had nothing fresh to say. The giants had not been near his house again. I glossed over the fact that I had not yet asked Dina to go and stay with the Carswells.

In my turn I told them all the facts but not all my guesses.

Then Jota said: "All right, let's call on the giants. We'll go to the camp."

It was only to he expected that Jota would propose direct action.

Gil was reluctant. He didn't say he was afraid to go. He argued against the idea in general. But when Jota and I decided to go without him, Gil stopped arguing and seemed to think it might be a good idea.

So Jota and I went to look at the giants' base.

Chapter Four

I drove home first, taking Jota with me, for he insisted we should change into dark clothes.

We knew the place where the camp must be: "In a bend on the river about a mile upstream." It was a piece of wasteland which campers had used before, but not often, because modern campers had cars or caravans or bicycles or trucks, and if they hadn't they wanted to be near a road where they could catch buses. This spot was near no road, and anybody camping there who wanted to come into Shuteley had to walk all the way.

It was a good place, perhaps the best place in the vicinity, for campers who wanted privacy. Yet it was also a place where anyone who wanted to spy on them could do so very easily.

And yet, as I said to Jota just before turning into our drive: "We may be making fools of ourselves. If they knew the precise second when you'd walk into my office, don't they know already that we're on our way to spy on them?"

Such considerations didn't bother Jota. "Then something may develop. And that's what we want."

I left the car outside the house, and Jota took his one trunk inside with him.

Sheila met us in the hall, and at sight of Jota she started and shot a quick glance at me which could only be described as unfriendly. "I thought I told you . . . " she said.

"Sorry," I said rather awkwardly. "I knew you were going shopping. I thought you'd have left."

I had to put it that way, because when we came in I knew she hadn't left. Her Austin mini was still in the drive.

"Hello, Sheila," said Jota easily. "You look more wonderful than ever."

Sheila said nothing. She picked up her shopping bag and went out, slamming the front door.

"You should have phoned, you know," Jota told me. "Don't you know anything about women? It's nothing to do with whether she loves me or hates my guts. Maybe she wouldn't have prettied herself up anyway. You should have given her the choice, to be here or not, to be dressed up or just -- "

"Let's change," I said irritably. I didn't want a lecture from Jota, of all people, on Sheila, of all people.

Jota was staring past me at the stairs. I turned. Dina was descending slowly, dressed in an old pink evening dress of Sheila's.

"She saw an old Goldwyn picture on television the other day," I murmured. "Beautiful girls coming down wide staircases." Raising my voice, I called: "Dina -- would you like to go and stay with the Carswells?"

She stopped playacting at once, lifted her long skirt and ran down the rest of the way. "Now?" she said eagerly.

"If you like."

She turned. "I'll go and pack."

"Wait, Dina. Aren't you going to say hello to Jota?"

"Hello," she said, and started for the stairs.

"She's lovely," Jota 'said. "No change? I mean -- "

"I know what you mean," I said shortly. "No change."

"That," he said, "is a great pity."

"That," I replied,. "is an understatement."

"What I mean is -- "

"I know what you mean."

He seemed to feel I should be more forthcoming. "Naturally I'm interested," he said. "Dina's my cousin."

I added nothing, however, and the subject was dropped.

The probable camp site being on the other side of the river, we rowed across the placid Shute in a rubber dinghy. Seldom used, the boat was invaluable at times, the nearest bridge being at Shuteley.

We made a considerable detour in order to be able to approach the place wherd we expected the camp to be from the far side, and we stopped talking as we neared the spot. Sound can carry unexpectedly in the open, especially near water.

Of course Jota, Gil and I had played as kids all around Shuteley, and the countryside had changed less than the town, which hadn't changed much. There were some places where we knew every bush, every tree and every stone, and this was one of them.

Along the riverside east of the probable camp site there was a jungle of undergrowth, and it was through this that we approached. A slight breeze rustled the leaves and cloaked any noise we might have made.

The camp was exactly where we expected and the giants didn't know we were there. At least, if they did they were pretending they didn't, and that seemed out of character.

At first sight their camp was like any other. There were two large tents and five small ones. Most of the boys and girls I had already seen were there, and there were some I was sure I hadn't seen. The sixteen who had been in The Copper Beech the evening before, plus Greg, were not, therefore, the whole company.

In the shade of a canopy two girls were reading magazines. Four of the men lay on the grass sunbathing, and on the other side of the big tents, three girls lay drowsily in the afternoon heat. Two or three more sat on the river bank, not bathing, merely dangling their toes in the water.

Two who were missing were Miranda and Greg. The chance link produced a sudden stab of jealousy in me. Was Miranda Greg's girl?

Such things happened. They kept happening. A girl talked as if a certain man was as far as she was concerned the person least likely to succeed. And then you found out . . .

On the face of it, Miranda didn't like Jota much and liked Greg less. But I knew that any vague ideas I might have about Miranda and me -- adolescent fantasies, anyway, fatuous even if I weren't married to Sheila -- were going to be overturned by Greg or Jota, if not both. I knew this because such things always happened. It was in the nature of things.

Anyway, the camp presented a very normal scene. I didn't know what Jota had expected, but I hadn't expected this. Not when the giants didn't know we were watching them.

We could see very well, we were unlikely to be detected, but unfortunately we were too far away to pick up any of the lazy, murmured conversation of either group of sunbathers.

And after five minutes I was more than ready to leave. I was rather afraid that Jota was going to force the issue by striding into the camp and making something happen. Uncertain why I didn't want that, I was nevertheless certain that it would be a mistake.

Every single person in the camp was dressed exactly as might be expected. Nothing sensational like the luxon dresses was visible, and that was puzzling. If the giants didn't mind creating a sensation in Shuteley, why were they so conventional in their own camp?

Did they know we were watching them, after all?

The tents, too, were straightforward . . . Primus stoves, plastic containers, buckets, basins -- every item of camping equipment I could see looked standard.

That crystallized one of the things that puzzled me about the giants. If their origin was as strange as I suspected, one of two things could have been expected.

Either they'd make quite certain their clothes, money, appearance, speech, camping equipment, and everything else they had with them were authentic. Or, careless of what Shuteley thought of them, they'd appear in their true colors, which were, I was quite certain, vastly different from anything we had ever seen.

But they steered a baffling middle course.

At last what I had feared came about. "Come on," said Jota in a normal tone, and moved forward.

"No," I whispered urgently, trying to hold him back.

"They're ordinary kids or they're not," he said. "Let's talk to them and find out."

Reluctantly I followed him, and we strode into the camp.

No, they hadn't been expecting us. The sunbathers sat up, startled, one of the girls who had unfastened the strap of her bra holding a towel in front of her.

"Greg!" somebody shouted, and Greg emerged from one of the tents. I wondered: was Miranda in there?

"Hi," said Greg casually, coming to meet us.

All the giants gathered together -- and they were giants, seen in this setting. Nobody was fat, but the vital statistics of both boys and girls were unusual . . . Average figures among the girls, I calculated, would be 41-27-40. Scaled down, very satisfactory. But they had to stand back for the full effect to be made.

There was no pretense that we were anything but unwelcome visitors. Someone whispered to Greg, and then he faced us.

"So you came to spy on us, Val," Greg said. "Jota's idea, I guess. He said Jota this time, not Clarence Mulliner.

"We simply came to -- "

"Fft," said Greg derisively, pointing. I followed his glance. His meaning, and his conclusion, were unmistakable. We had come from dense undergrowth. Nobody openly approaching the camp would ever have come that way.

While my head was turned he must have made a gesture. Before we could move we were each in the grasp of two of the most gigantic of the giants.

From that moment I ceased thinking of the giants as kids. When two of them could hold Jota and I as those four held us, they were men.

"A duel," said Greg. "No, two duels. That's it."

There was an excited hum among the giants.

Jota's silence surprised me. He was seldom at a loss for words.

"Knives or guns," said Greg. "I'll take Jota. Obviously, Wesley, you can have Val."

They began to form a ring. One of the girls ran into Greg's tent, and emerged almost at once with a pair of wicked-looking knives and two old-fashioned dueling pistols in a case.

"This has gone far enough," I said. "Where's Miranda?"

"She isn't here," Greg said. And the way he said it made me certain that her absence completely let him off the leash, that he felt free to do things he might not otherwise have dared do.

In a daze I saw Jota calmly elect to fight with the pistols. His idea was to play along with the giants, see how far they would go. Perhaps he was right, I thought. On his own, without any conventional reaction, he'd possibly have been able to get himself accepted on his own terms as usual.

The giants played out the farce gravely, though with suppressed excitement. One of them offered himself as Jota's second.

Then Greg said, not to us but to the rest of them: "This really is a test. This really is worth while. I'm taking Jota." He stopped, the pause heavy with significance, although what the significance might be was a complete mystery to us. He went on: "So after this we'll all know, won't we?"

A wave of uneasiness ran through them. All the girls stood well back. Then we got on with it. The pistols were inspected, the meeting-ground paced out. Then Greg and Jota stood back to back, and at a signal began to stride slowly and steadily apart.

They had not let me be Jota's second. I had therefore had no chance to examine the pistols. They would, of course, be loaded with blanks. Perhaps they were not really pistols at all, but cigarette lighters or elaborate toys.

I couldn't take the affair seriously, and I was sure Jota wasn't doing so either, because it was obvious that the giants were simply playing at duels. There had been a chill for a moment as Greg made his little speech, but already those not directly involved were smiling and laughing, as if this was all a big ioke.

Jota and Greg took their last pace and turned. The two shots were so close that it was impossible to tell which was first. Jota's, I thought, but of course he had deloped -- fired in the air. Crazy though he might be at times, he wasn't taking the chance of really shooting Greg.

But Greg had not deloped. And incredulously I watched Jota sink to his knees, blood at his mouth.

When we reached him he was dead.

I don't know what I said and did. The rest was nightmare.

Fragments of thought flashed through my mind. One was that if our world really was nothing to the giants, murder in it didn't count to them. If to them we were unreal, they could kill us as we'd shoot clay pipes. Was that the explanation?

I also thought of the incredible manner of Jota's death. He had always seemed larger than life. Yet at the end, he died grotesquely -- firing in the air, quite certain the duel was a piece of juvenile playacting, letting Greg pick him off.

I wondered if Miranda's presence would have made any difference. Would she have stood back with the rest of the girls? Or would she, having spoken to me three times and lunched with me, have felt what none of the others seemed to feel -- that we were human beings? I had to admit she had never shown any sign of it.

I noticed then, though I was unable to analyze it until later, that Greg had proved a point. The giants were looking at him with new respect -- no, not respect, rather caution and apprehension. Why this should be I didn't know. The reason had to be something more than that he had proved he could shoot straight. Perhaps it was because he had proved he could kill.

Incredibly, in the middle of this, they were making me choose weapons. Greg was telling me -- the sense registered, though the words did not -- that if I won, I was free to go.

"Killer," I whispered.

"We're all killers," he said indifferently. "You're a meat eater."

"Are you going to eat Jota?" I demanded.

"That's a point," he admitted, and groped mentally. "A hit -- a palpable hit," he added.

Realizing that this much was real, that I had to fight Wesley and he would kill me if he could, I chose the knives. Pistols were no use. Greg had shown he could shoot, and no doubt Wesley could too. I didn't know I couldn't, but I was fairly sure, never having tried.

Wesley was taller than me but not much heavier. Although some of the protocol of duello had been observed, no one had said anything about dress. I still wore dark pants and a dark sweater, and Wesley, in swimming briefs, evidently intended to stay that way.

We started fighting. In the first two seconds Wesley slashed my left wrist deeply and painfully, and nothing could have brought home to me more clearly that I was fighting for my life.

I knew this was a nightmare, I knew it wasn't real to the giants, and yet it had been real to Jota and it was real to me.

So I feinted, I slid under that teriifying blade, and before I got clear again I slashed Wesley's leg. It was a fearsome cut, and it nearly made me sick. The giants shouted and screamed with excitement.

I had tried to tell Greg that we couldn't kill them, that the death of Jota had been murder because Jota couldn't possibly try to kill him. And if I killed one of the giants, the police would see it only as murder.

But if I didn't kill Wesley, he would kill me. This I now fully accepted.

The slashed leg hampered him considerably. Faster than me until then, he had shown no particular skill with a knife. But then, I had none either.

He attacked twice and I dodged him, making him waste energy and lose blood. And now he knew that he could lose this fight -- I saw it in his eyes. With every moment he was slower and weaker.

I got him again. Although the slash across his chest did no serious damage, it made him a gory object, with rich blood welling from his leg on the grass and long streaks running down his torso.

It was his blood that nearly finished me. I slipped on it and he was on me, the knife high.

Too high. Never having fought with a knife, any more than I had, he paid for the dramatic gesture, knife raised at arm's length for the death stroke.

I cut his legs from under him, and as he fell pressed the knife into his heart. It was torn from my fingers.

Unfortunately for all of us, he didn't die quite as quickly as Jota had done . . .

"All right, Val," Greg said soberly, "you can go."

They were all sober now, the excitement fading from, their faces. Some of the girls looked rather sick.

I turned and walked out of the camp. What I was going to do now, I had no idea. The giants had killed Jota and I'd killed one of them.

Of one thing, somehow, I was certain. The giants would cover up. If I went to the police and took them back to the camp, there would be no sign of Jota or of Wesley. The blood would be gone . . .

Jota and I were striding into the camp. For a moment we faltered and stared at each other. Then Greg, enjoying himself, was saying: "No argument, please. Just get out."

Grinning at me in a not unfriendly way was Wesley. And I knew from his expression that the duels were something more than a figment of imagination. He looked exactly as if I had beaten him, fair and square, in any contest, and he was ready to admit it.

But there was no blood. He was unscratched, as I was.

It wasn't quite the same as the last time we had entered the camp. This time they were expecting us, lined up. The sunbathers were there too, on their feet. The shy girl had fastened her bra.

In a second sense, Jota came to life.

"No," he said. "I'd like to stay here with you. In fact, I will."

Greg frowned. "That was meant as a warning. If you -- "

"I'm warned," said Jota easily. "Now I'd like to stay with you for a while. I'll be no bother -- I've camped out often."

All the giants seemed taken aback.

"I'll even promise not to ask questions," Jota said. "Gosh, it's hot." He started taking off his jacket.

"We'll throw you out," said Greg.

"And I'll come back," Jota said. "I came back from the dead, didn't I?"

"We arranged that," said Greg ominously. "Next time we won't loop you back."

Jota had his jacket off and was unbuttoning his shirt. "Can someone lend me a pair of shorts?" he asked.

Greg suddenly laughed -- the bellow that had rattled the windows of my office. "I like you," he said.

"Most people do," said Jota.

"You're a bit like me," said Greg.

"In more ways than one," said Jota softly. And now he was speaking with significance.

There was a sudden silence. Jota knew something he wasn't supposed to know.

I was out of this, yet not entirely out of it, not without some clue. I had known Jota a long time . . .

"Remember," Greg said, "I killed you."

"Remember," Jota said, "I let you."

They suddenly all decided by common consent that if Jota was halfway one of them, I certainly wasn't. " He can't stay," Greg told Jota.

"That's all right," said Jota calmly. "I don't need anyone to hold my hand."

They were going to let him stay. He was going to have his way, as usual. And I knew he'd had this idea in his head all along.

Jota, despite a wide variety of personal contacts that were fleeting or lasting, was a lone wolf. He didn't want me with him. He wanted to do this his way.

"What's your name?" he asked one of the girls, the prettiest next to Miranda.

"Irwina," she said.

"Let's go and dangle our toes in the water -- after somebody lends me a pair of shorts."

Greg looked at me. "Get out," he said briefly.

I didn't argue. Jota, living in the camp, was bound to learn a lot -- perhaps everything there was to learn.

I walked away and left them.

It was quicker to walk back along the river bank than it would have been to cut across country to the road into town.

There was no point in going back to the office. I knew I couldn't do anything useful that afternoon. Fighting for your life, even if you win, doesn't leave you cool, calm and collected.

To say I was shaken was an understatement. Unharmed, unscratched though I was, I had lived the nightmare. Jota had died, and yet he had experienced less than I had. I could still feel the pain in my wrist, the warm dripping of blood. I would never forget what it was like to fight for my life, knowing the only choice was to kill or be killed. Nor would I forget what it was like to be a killer.

If I ever killed again, there would have to be a reason, a stronger reason even than self-defense. Until then I had not realized there could be a stronger reason. Yet if you kill merely to avoid being killed, you don't want to kill. If you kill in anger or hate, you mean it . . .

I was going home to have a stiff whisky, or two, or three. Sheila was out. And Dina would have gone to the Carswells.

I was glad Sheila wouldn't be at home. If a man and woman are close, married or not, everything that happens has to be shared, and as soon as possible. Once I'd have been running home to tell Sheila what had happened, to talk it out with her. As it was I was impatient to get into a cool, darkened room, out of the sun, with a glass and a bottle of Glen Grant.

I meant to get drunk. Yet I don't drink a lot, and seldom alone.

Ahead of me, I saw a swimmer in the river. And what a swimmer! She was moving away, gaining on me. She must therefore have slipped into the water, unnoticed, just in front of me.

Although I could see only her dark head, she must be Miranda. Nobody in Shuteley could swim like that.

I guessed at once where she was going.

When three or six or a dozen out of the ordinary things happen at more or less the same time, the chances of a connection between them are overwhelming. Miranda was swimming downriver. She wasn't swimming lazily, as anyone might on a hot day. She was swimming with a purpose, to get somewhere.

About half a mile downriver, on the south side, was the copse where I had seen the unexplained, inexplicable radiance. And short of going all the way to Shuteley, crossing there, coming back on the other side and then walking up our drive, past the house and through the garden, the only way to reach it from the giants' camp was to swim or use a boat.

I started to run. I wanted to be in the copse before Miranda, to hide and see what happened. Unless I ran I had no chance of beating her there, because I had to run past the copse to where Jota and I had left the dinghy, row myself over and get myself established in the copse before Miranda arrived.

I made it. I was across the river and well hidden at the bottom of the garden just before Miranda swam up the first inside leg of the W bend.

I saw her climb onto the bank, shaking the water from her hair . . . then she said, not loudly: "Come out, Val."

There was no point in going on pretending. I stood up, pushed my way through the bushes, and joined her on the small strip of grass at the edge of the river.

"You saw me?" I said.

"I saw your boat."

At the point where I crossed, only a tiny stretch of river past the bends was visible. By a piece of bad luck, Miranda must have been exactly at that point when I was rowing myself across.

She sat down on the grass. Her swimsuit was a brief white two-piece, and I had never seen anything so lovely as her in it. Not sexy -- that, too, of course, but she was genuinely beautiful rather than provocative.

"Where were you?" she asked.

I sat down too. "At the camp. With Jota."

"What happened?"

I told her.

For a moment she was furiously angry, though silent -- the first time I had seen her really alive. But all she said was: "That Greg . . . Of course he'll ruin everything. We knew that. Everybody knew that."

"Ruin what?" I asked.

She ignored that. "And in this crazy duel, Jota just died?"

"He fired his gun in the air."

She nodded. "That figures."

"He said -- and everybody seemed to make sense of it but me -- he let Greg kill him."

She nodded.

"But . . . that's ridiculous. I mean, Jota didn't know the clock was going to be put back. He didn't, I'm certain. So why would he . . . ?"

"That's not what he meant."

"Greg used the word 'loop' . . . 'Next time we won't loop you back.' "

She sighed.

"Ifs some kind of time warp, obviously," I said. "The same thing that enables you to be here, when anyone can see you were born in some other century."

Miranda said: "Val, please give up. I've told you a few unimportant things. There aren't many unimportant things left that I can tell you. But if you promise to stop fishing, we can talk if you like."

An idea stirred in my mind as I noticed that even in a bikini she managed to be more elegant than a Paris model.

I had, of course, no intention of stopping fishing. What I wanted to do was pull this beautiful fish so far out of water that, gasping for breath, she'd tell me what I wanted to know before I let her off the hook. It might not be possible, but I meant to try.

Her white two-piece was already quite dry. Her pale, creamy skin had already stopped steaming and only her damp hair showed that she had been in the water a few minutes ago.

Until that moment I had thought a bikinl was just a bikini, and a girl wearing one was not so much dressed as censored. But Miranda's two-piece was subtle . . . the bra, with shaped straps, not too small, concealed and revealed her thoughtfully and tastefully, as if a talented artist had painstakingly drawn and re-drawn the lines until his critical eye was satisfied. The briefs, not too tiny either, harmonized with and complemented muscles and curves. Superficially similar, the white two-piece was actually in a completely different class from the brutally utilitarian kind of bikini which is merely insurance against arrest.

"Well?" she said. "Shall I turn round so that you can inspect the other side too?"

"I'm thinking," I said. "Suppose a girl from the seventeenth century were here now. Just an ordinary pretty girl, not the daughter of a duke. She probably wouldn't be very clean. She would have bad teeth. Her face would be marked with smallpox and maybe worse things. Makeup, if any, would be crude. Scars, not properly treated, would mar her skin."

Miranda was listening so intently that I was encouraged.

"Her clothes would be old, imperfectly washed with poor soap, or no soap at all. They'd fit only approximately. If there was a bit of cleavage, it would be unsubtle, almost as if she'd forgotten to put something on. Am I making sense?"

"I'm listening," said Miranda.

"A girl of today," I said, "can make far more of herself without really trying. There's plenty of clean water and good soap, and in this part of the world we've beaten the insect problem. She wears new or nearly new clothes, and they fit. Underneath she can wear lightweight machinery that does a marvelous job on what Nature forgot to do. All kinds of makeup are available, if she happens to know how to use it, and she doesn't have to have bad teeth. However . . . "

I paused. But Miranda Said nothing.

"After another century or two," I said, "purely technical things like better materials and seamless joins will be taken for granted. As well as that, though, experience in design should count for something. Oh, I know none of you would wear the clothes you've been wearing here back where you came from, any more than a girl from my office would go around in 1666 dressed as she is now. But if she went back -- "

"Don't labor it," said Miranda. "You've made your point."

"What puzzles me," I said, "is your curious compromise. I mean, everything I saw in the camp looked right. You've all got your hair cut the right way. Yet just this morning, when you wore a pink suit that would otherwise have been perfectly all right for Shuteley High Street, it was made of luxon."

"Well . . . that was a mistake."

"I thought only Greg made mistakes."

Rather sharply she said: "It's not mistakes Greg makes. Some of the things he does he means. Others he just doesn't care about. A mistake is something you'd take back if you had the chance. Greg wouldn't take anything back."

"But he just did. He looped Jota back."

She decided to surrender on that, yielding on one more thing that didn't matter too much.

"Loop equipment is small and light and the effect is purely local," she said. "There isn't supposed to be a set at the camp, but apparently someone's got one. I'll have to do something about that . . . "

"Just minor gadgetry," I said. "Like luxon. Nothing most."

She looked at me sharply, wondering, as she seemed to have done once or twice, if I was possibly not as primitively moronic as I was supposed to be.

She told me a little more about the loop technique, and I realized that I'd been pretty near the mark. To her, it was minor, unremarkable, which was why she told me about it. In much the same way I might have tried to explain a zip-fastener to a girl of the seventeenth century.

When small, local disaster occurred, you snuffed it out of existence. If an axe slipped and slashed your leg, you snapped back a few seconds and avoided the accident. If a car, carelessly reversed at a harbor, plunged into the dock, you took the careless moments back and braked before the car went over the edge. If you dropped a precious vase and it shattered in a thousand fragments, you turned the second hand back and didn't drop the vase.

It was a useful but very ordinary technique, possibly more significant than paper-clips, zip-fasteners, safety-pins and cigarette lighters, but not to be classed with things like the transistor radio, television or atomic energy . . . she thought.

And it occurred to me for the first time that Miranda was no genius, merely an ordinary girl of her time, fairly intelligent but no deep thinker.

"Another thing," I said. "Food is just food. The quality doesn't matter. Now that's a real surprise. All the indications are that people will become more choosy, not less. But the expected doesn't always come about. I could make a guess . . . Expanding world population makes food supply more and more difficult. And maybe synthetic food isn't practical, at any rate not in your time. So people are conditioned, treated, drugged, trained to regard food as merely fuel. To eat enough but not too much. To be healthy, to avoid anything grossing, never to get fat and never to regard food as an end in itself."

Miranda refused to react, so I prodded her again. "So you do come from the future. Despite all protestations."

She lay right back on the grass. "We're from the present," she said with finality.

"That means we're in the past. Your time is the real time. We're ancient, ignorant, dead savages. That's why we're not real. That's why our problems, our lives, don't matter. That's why the disaster that's going to happen in the next few hours is going to be merely an interesting spectacle. That's why, though you give as little as possible away, you talk with us as I might talk to some ignorant civilian Trojan, not even a soldier, who hasn't the faintest suspicion that the great wooden horse is full of men. If we're not too unimportant to talk to, we're too stupid."

She was sitting up again, starfled. She was breathing deeply and suddenly flushed.

What I had done I didn't know. But whatever it was, it took effect -- as if I, a foreigner, had suddenly spoken to her in her own language; or as if I'd kissed her the way Jota, no doubt, could have done.

She didn't say anything, yet I knew that I had got through to her. And I knew that Miranda was no longer a thousand miles or years out of my reach.

I leaned over and kissed her lightly. She did nothing. I kissed her again, more insistently, more demandingly.

"Let's go up to the house," she said, pushing me away. "Sheila can't be there, or you wouldn't be acting this way. I'm thirsty."

"So," I said, "am I . . . You might as well come up to the house, since you can't do what you were going to do here with me around, can you?"

"No," she admitted, and smiled.

It was the first real smile I'd had from her.

In the house, I tried to make her drink whisky, from ancient motives. But she wanted lemonade. It seemed to startle her when I put ice in it. Evidently this prehistoric method of chilling drinks was strange to her.

Standing in bare feet and a white bikini on the deep carpet of the lounge, she was out of place in a dozen ways. Although I had drawn the curtains in case anyone happened to look through the window, I was uneasy. "Would you like to borrow a dress?" I said. "If Sheila's things are too big for you, Dina's might fit."

"No, thanks," she said. "I'll swim back." A thought struck her. "Who's she?"

"My sister."

I wasn't telling her, I was reminding her. She must know about Dina.

But she didn't. It showed.

And I was startled. How could she know what she knew and not know about Dina?

I started asking questions again. "You didn't know about Dina? You didn't even know she existed? Yet you knew Jota would meet me at 3:10 this afternoon."

"Did I?"

"Greg did. And you wanted to meet him . . . you arrived precisely on cue."

"Tell me about Dina."

"Do you know about my mother?"

"Something . . . she's sick, isn't she?"

"If you want to use a euphemism, yes."

"And Dina?"

"Sick too -- using the same euphemism. Pretty, healthy, stable in her way. But that's the way of a child. That's how she'll stay."

"I wonder."

What do you mean, you wonder?"

She sat on a couch, drawing up her legs. "You're not sick -- in that way."

"If I am, I hope it doesn't show. But Sheila and I have no children."

"Why not?"

"Don't be dense."

"I think you're wrong. I think your children would be normal."

"And their children?"

She shrugged. "You know the difference between heredity and environment. If environment, illness, anything like that was the cause of what happened to your mother -- "

"It can't be."

"Why not?"

"Because of Dina."

She questioned me briefly but rather thoroughly about my mother, about Dina, about me.

Presently she smiled, and her smile was warmer now. "I knew you were sorry for yourself, Val," she said. "It shows. I didn't know you had so many good excuses for being sorry for yourself."

"Excuses?" I said.

"Oh, sure. Even if you're no psychologist, you know that self-pity is self-destruction. If you've only one leg and everybody else has two -- too bad, but self-pity can only make your situation worse."

"Thanks for the lecture," I said.

She smiled. "Don't do that," she said. "That's self-defense. You're putting up a barrier. It's not in the least necessary, because I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you . . . "

"What else are you doing?"

She got up again and began to move about. I tried not to watch her, because she affected me almost as she would affect a lusty seventeen-year-old boy who had been in solitary confinement for a year. Yet it was impossible not to watch her.

"This is only 1966," she said. "It's not long since psychiatry was born. Clever men found out that many things which had always been assumed to be straightforward physical ailments were actually caused by mental factors. And, of course, they went too far. Now almost everything short of a broken leg or diptheria is supposed to be psychosomatic. Quite soon now other clever men will start swinging the pendulum again. Things in the blood other than alcohol can cause disturbances -- "

"Obviously," I said.

"And a great deal of what used to be called madness can be very simply dealt with."

"Loop it out of existence," I retorted. "It's easy."

"No, not that . . . I think there's something quick and easy that could cure Dina. Not your mother. She really is psychotic. Dina is . . . well, she just needs a certain stimulation -- I think. I can't be sure. It depends on whether there's anything fundamentally wrong in the heredity line. Hers and yours."

"Is there a way of finding out?"

She looked at me with sudden suspicion, and relaxed instantly. "There's a way I could find out about you," she said. "And your children, It's a rather curious way to find out such a thing . . . But it would be infallible. It would settle whether there was any chance of your passing on . . . what you're afraid you might pass on."

"Will you do it?" I asked quickly.

She smiled and looked away. "You don't know what you're asking."

"What do you mean?"

"And because you don't know what you're asking . . . Turn around, Val."

Perhaps I was slow, but I hadn't the faintest idea what was coming. I thought she was going to hypnotize me or drug me, though where she'd get the drugs was quite a question.

A moment later she said: "All right. Turn back."

She was on the thick carpet, naked, her marvelous body twice as marvelous as even my heated imagination had been able to picture it.

She beld out her arms to me, yet like a fool I hesitated.

"This way?" I said stupidly.

"This is part of it. But if you're reluctant . . . "

I ran to her.

Chapter Five

I had read and heard of acts of love which were not merely sex, which were more even than the consummation of true love: timeless moments when two people met and were reborn. I had not believed such things could happen.

I didn't even love Miranda, and quite certainly she didn't love me. Yet what happened then and there shocked us, drained us, and left us two different people.

Although I was aware of none of the details, which were unimportant and probably quite conventional, I knew that she was as much taken aback as I was. I also vaguely understood why: it was only a few minutes before that I had made her see me as something more than a character in a play, and now we were together with a background of silent thunder.

We didn't discuss it; we didn't try to explain it or explain it away. It was not love, it was not passion. It was destiny. It was one of the moments, big or small, after which things are never quite the same again.

And we recognized this, dimly, yet with no possibility of pretense that nothing particular had happened.

Miranda's reaction didn't really surprise me, though I couldn't understand it. "Val," she said softly, "without meaning to, I've done something more tragic than Greg could ever manage to do."

I didn't reply. What was there to say to that?

She jumped up. "You must stay till I come back," she said.

Before I could emerge from euphoria -- which I had no particular desire to do, anyway -- she was gone.

I slept. When I awoke, Miranda was leaning over me, wearing her white bikini.

"You needn't worry," she said. "Your children will be entirely normal. There isn't the slightest doubt."

Only in that moment did I realize how much I wanted children -- more than that, wanted Sheila and me to have children. Always when Sheila had said or hinted that things would be different if we had children I had been irritated at the irrelevance. Things would be different if I were seventy-five feet tall, or if Sheila were a man, or if I were a millionaire, or if we could have children.

All I said was: "You had that tested -- that way?"

She nodded. "In the circumstances, it was the only way. I could hardly . . . " She checked herself.

"You went to the copse."

"Perhaps."

"What about Dina?"

"I think I'll be seeing Dina." She was evasive. "I'll do something . . . she won't remember what, and it'll be better if nobody else knows."

She didn't want to talk any more. "I mustn't see you again, unless . . . No, I shan't see you again, Val. You're not going out tonight, and I . . . Goodby, Val."

She ran from the room. And I knew somehow that she meant goodby -- not au revoir.

By the time Sheila drove up, twenty minutes later, I had carefully removed all evidence that Miranda had been in the house. I left my own glass where it was, but washed hers and put it away.

I just didn't know how I'd act and how Sheila would act after what had happened. Not only had I been faithful to Sheila since we got married, I had been faithful to her since the day we met.

After hearing her mini drive up and stop, I waited in the hall. Sheila might guess what had happened the moment she saw my face . . . Belatedly I realized I should have found something to do, instead of simply standing waiting for Sheila with no prepared explanation of what I'd been doing all afternoon.

She came in and said: "What's her name, Val?"

"Miranda," I said. It would have been fatuous to ask what she was talking about, whose name she meant, and even more fatuous to ask how she had found out.

"Why did you do it, Val?" Sheila asked quietly. She should have waited for an answer, but she surrendered some of her advantage by going on: "I thought . . . with Dina out of the way for a while, we might have had a chance. Dina's the root of all the trouble, you know. All of it. You don't think so, but you don't have to put up with Dina at her worst, all day."

So we were talking about Dina, not Miranda, and the heat was temporarily off.

"Lots of people have in-law trouble," I said rather weakly.

"Yes, but not this kind of trouble," said Sheila bleakly. "If she was a cripple, I could speak to her plainly and reach some kind of understanding. If she was old I could at least try to manage her. But she's just . . . well, you know."

"I know."

"I hate her, Val, do you know that? She does. Of course, she hates me, so we're even. But she hated me first."

Some people could ignore dislike. Sheila wasn't one of them. She couldn't be indifferent.

She went back to Miranda then, trying to work up the fury she had felt earlier. But it was too late. And I had realized with relief that she wasn't talking about Miranda and me in the lounge an hour ago, but Miranda and me in the Red Lion earlier.

"Did you have to humiliate me, Val?" she demanded. "Did you have to take her where everybody knows you, and me? Couldn't you have taken her to some hotel out of town?"

"You've got it wrong, Sheila," I said.

"Of course. Obviously. What else could be expected? She's a rich client, the daughter of the Earl of Shoreditch."

"She's one of the giants," I said.

"The what? Oh, those kids. Don't be ridiculous. I hear she's about the same height as me."

"I mean, she's with them. Listen, Sheila. There's something very strange happening here in Shuteley, something fantastic. This afternoon Jota was killed. I might have been killed too, but instead I killed my opponent -- "

"Killed?" She stared at me. "Jota dead?"

I explained what had happened. She listened, yet I knew I wasn't getting through to her. It wasn't that she disbelieved what I said. It was rather that she was the kind of woman, the kind of womanly woman, who saw her own family and household and everything that affected them in technicolor and everything else in black and white. The giants were all black and white, except Miranda, who had lunched with me at the Red Lion. Besides, she wasn't a giant.

It might have made a difference to Sheila's attitude, I thought, if Miranda had been six feet four. Then she'd have been a freak and anything I did might have been laughed off as temporary aberration, as if I had fallen desperately in love with the fat lady of a traveling circus.

"Anyway," I said, "they'll be gone tomorrow."

"How do you know?"

"I told you. Greg said -- "

"And you believe everything you're told?"

"Sheila, these giants know things. One of the things . . . "

"Well, go on."

"They say," I muttered, "that I needn't worry about my children. That there's no reason why they shouldn't be normal. And I believe it's true."

Sheila's head came up quickly. For a moment there was radiance in her face. She had fought against my decision, not so much became she wanted children, though she did, as because she believed we needed them.

Then the radiance died. "Who told you -- Miranda?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"And anything she says must be true?"

"It's not like that."

"Isn't it?" She paused, and then asked: "Is she very beautiful?"

"Very. But she'll be gone tomorrow too."

"So you have to make hay while the sun shines?"

The phone rang. "I'll get it," I said at once, too quickly, for Sheila looked at me calculatingly. Invariably she answered the phone, even if I was at home, because I wasn't often called at home and if I was, her answering it gave me a chance to think or pretend not to be home.

She was doing me an injustice this time, for the possibility that Miranda might be calling had not crossed my mind.

It was, in fact, Jota.

"Haven't much time," he said. "I'm out for a stroll with some of the giants . . . Val, something happens tonight. They haven't said anything definite -- I guessed from the way they talk about tomorrow, as if everything's going to be different."

He wasn't telling me anything I didn't know.

"Good? Bad?" I said.

"They're excited. That's all I can say. Except -- they seem to think they're going to do me a good turn. I think now they let me stay with them so that they'd know where I was and could keep an eye on me. One other thing -- go out. Take Sheila with you. Go right away. Don't waste any time."

"Why?"

"I don't know why. Think they tell me everything? But I gather you're supposed to stay at home tonight. It's taken for granted. It's assumed you must stay at home."

"Then I suppose I must," I said.

"Don't be an idiot. Why give in? They think you'll stay at home. So go out. Don't be a vegetable."

"Jota," I said. "What you and Greg were saying to each other . . . that must be important. What exactly did you mean when -- "

Jota chuckled and rang off.

"So it wasn't Miranda," said Sheila. "What a disappointment for you."

"Sheila," I said, "lets go out for dinner."

"And we'll happen to run into Miranda."

"Don't be silly. You pick the place. Right out of town somewhere. Sheila . . . I love you.".

She looked at me doubtfully, suspiciously. But I met her gaze fair and square.

It was hypocritical, telling Sheila I loved her so soon after what had happened. I was quite certain that what had happened between Miranda and me would never happen again. She had called it tragic . . . anyway, she had called something tragic. We had met without meeting, and then suddenly in an explosion of feeling we had fused in one way and been blown apart in another.

"We never go out to dinner," Sheila said.

That reminded me: Miranda, not just Jota, had said "You're not going out tonight." That was another of the things she knew. It wasn't in the cards that I would leave the house again that day.

"We're going this time," I said. "Go and get yourself all dolled up. There isn't a girl in Shuteley who can hold a candle to you when you really try."

"Except Miranda, of course."

"Miranda isn't in Shute!ey. I don't think she's anywhere."

Although this puzzled Sheila, it also seemed to satisfy her.

I rushed Sheila. She wanted to spend hours getting ready, as women do. She took it for granted she'd have a bath and do all the other things that had to be done, and we'd get out about seven or eight or nine.

But I thought, I had a feeling, that if we didn't sidestep fate, we'd lose the chance. Maybe twenty giants would arrive and keep us at home by force.

And as we closed the front door and walked to the car -- my car -- I was certain there had been something behind that feeling, for I felt myself wakening up. A moment before I had felt tired and rather disinclined to go out after all, and if I hadn't been hustling Sheila, if there had been any easy way to change my mind, I'd have been quite content to stay at home watching television instead.

We drove to Shutdey and southwards across country to a new roadhouse, the Orbit, on the nearest main road. We had been there just once before, for a drink.

We talked only casually. Miranda wasn't mentioned, nor the giants, nor Jota, nor Dina. And all the chill between us gradually melted. I realized in wonder that I liked being with Sheila, that we were going to enjoy ourselves. It had been like this before we were married, and for a short, a very short time afterwards.

I was happier than I had been for years. Sheila and I would have children. We'd become a family. There must be some solution to the problem of Dina, if we really worked on it. Perhaps it would be a tough one -- she might have to be shown, with brutal directness if necessary, that if Sheila and I couldn't live our lives in peace with her around, Dina couldn't be allowed to stay around.

Curiously, although I completely accepted Miranda's statement that I could have normal children, I left her promise that something would be done about Dina entirely in the air. I didn't even think about it again. That I could have a family without fear was, after all, not hard to believe. It had been doubts that had been set at rest, not certainties. Dina turning into a normal teenager was something more in the nature of a miracle.

A mile or so short of the roadhouse, Sheila said: "We're far too early, Val. There won't be a soul there, and it's too soon for dinner. Let's stop for a while."

So I drove off the road.. .

Married couples abandon pre-marital parked-car behavior for a hundred excellent reasons. Kids stay parked for hours, not necessarily misbehaving themselves, because they've nowhere else to go. After marriage, many couples try to recapture magic moments in cars parked at favorite spots . . . but even if they stay in love, it can't be the same.

Yet Sheila and I, just off the road, in broad daylight, managed to go back. We did nothing more than hold hands and talk, yet it was the same as it used to be -- half an hour was a minute. We talked about nothing at all, certainly not about Miranda or Jota or Dina.

We moved on in the end only because, despite the magic, we were hungry. And the magic needn't necessarily fly away.

By this time I had made up my mind irrevocably about Dina. Something which she couldn't help was strangling her life. But it couldn't be allowed to strangle three lives instead of one.

The roadhouse was long and low. The noise from it as I parked the car rather took me aback, because we'd thought it was a fairly quiet place. Then I realized that on such a hot night all the windows were wide open.

Sheila had put on a new dress, and I didn't get the effect until she emerged from the ladies' room. She flushed with pleasure as I looked at her, knowing that I meant what I looked.

She wore a short green dress with just enough cleavage, and I saw in wonder that she was much more beautiful than she had been the |ast time I looked at her in this way. A business associate who had married a lovely girl and then divorced her had told me once, over a drink, that he had never wanted her more than when he saw her for the first time after she had remarried.

I was lucky. I was having the same sort of experience, only for me it wasn't too late.

I tried not to think of Miranda, and then, as Sheila went ahead to our table, I let myself think Of Miranda . . . and Sheila didn't suffer by comparison after all.

Miranda was the actress in the safari picture. Her perfection had the same unreality. She wasn't a girl who worked wonders with nothing at all. She had access to tricks far beyond anything available even to the girl in the safari picture.

Sheila didn't have any tricks. And Sheila was my wife.

We had a wonderful time. It was easily the best evening we had ever spent together. And with every second together, we came closer.

Only once more during the evening, while Sheila and I were dancing, did Miranda come to mind. And it was with gratitude, for I knew that if I had not somehow been released that day, Sheila and I would not be spending this evening, this kind of evening together.

We didn't prolong the evening greedily. We knew that unlike kids out on such a date, we didn't have to part afterwards. We could go home -- and to a home without Dina.

So it was not long after ten when we got back in the car and started to drive home.

"What's that, Val?" Sheila said idly.

I stared, and then put my foot hard down.

The sky ahead of us was on fire.

I'd seen fires at night before. Quite often they look far worse than they are. An empty barn aflame can light the sky, over a hill, like a burning town.

But this was something more than a burning barn. We could see flames shooting high, flames and smoke -- and Shuteley was still ten miles away.

The flames that seemed to be shooting miles into the sky really were what they seemed.

At once it all fell into place. The giants knew . Now I understood Greg's visit and his bizarre idea of insuring against disaster in the next twenty-four hours. Of course he hadn't meant to collect. He hadn't even meant to have the policy drawn up. He had merely been amusing himself.

Other things began to assume more significance. Miranda had known . I'd stay at home, and I'd gone out partly to make her wrong. Had she known then I'd die? Or had she been thinking something quite different, that I'd be safe out of it, because the Queen Anne house was in a bend in the river hundreds of yards from the town?

Dina . . . my heart missed a beat. Gil's house was in the middle of old timbered houses in the oldest part of town.

Then, with hope, I remembered that Miranda knew where Dina was and had said she expected to see her later.

The giants, who had known all about this fire, surely didn't propose simply to stand and watch, did they?

"What is it, Val?" Sheila said, and for a moment I thought she didn't even realize Shuteley was on fire. But then she added: "What are you thinking about?" and I knew that she'd been watching my face.

"About the giants," I said.

"You mean -- they did this?"

I hadn't been thinking that, and still didn't, on the whole. It seemed far more likely that, knowing this was going to happen, they had booked their seats for the show in advance. Maybe last week they'd watched the Great Fire of London, seeing St. Paul's burned down, and eighty-seven parish churches, and 13,200 homes.

At the thought, I jerked convulsively and so did the car. The Great Fire was in 1666. This was 1966, the three hundredth anniversary of the London disaster. Could that be coincidence? Or did it, in a twisted way, explain everything?

"Sheila," I said. "Can you remember the date of the Great Fire of London?"

"Sixteen something," she said wonderingly.

"No, I mean the day and the month."

"You must be kidding," she said.

It was a possibility that the giants were teenage vandals of time, destroying for the sake of destruction and doing it on a scale beyond belief. Things I knew made this possible too -- the way, for example, in which the giants, even Miranda until a few short hours ago, obviously regarded Shuteley and the people in it as mere shadows of living creatures.

Was that what Miranda had meant when she used the word tragic -- tragic because suddenly, because of what had happened between us, she realized that the people of Shuteley were something more than names fading from ancient gravestones?

But then I remembered a small item in a TV program some weeks ago, unimportant at the time. That had been the exact anniversary of the Great Fire. It was past. So this wasn't just a fantastic, manufactured playback for the giants' amusement, three centuries later.

"Talk to me, Val," said Sheila. "And don't drive so fast. You nearly went off the road at the last corner."

I slowed a little. As we approached Shuteley the fire seemed to spread until it was all around us, although that couldn't be so.

"Shuteley," I said. "The most old-fashioned town in England. Oh, afterwards it's always easy to see . . . the Titanic, instead of being unsinkable, was constructed so that if a certain thing happened she absolutely had to sink. The Lusitania acted as if she wanted to be sunk, paying no attention to instructions and being in one of the last places she ought to have been. At Pearl Harbor, half a dozen warnings were ignored, disbelieved, and what should have been expected was an unbelievable shock -- "

"What are you talking about?" she asked, bewildered.

"Fire risk. Well, who should know better than me? Naturally, every new building in Shuteley has to conform to all the latest safety regulations. Modifications are always being made in all the old houses. But how much has it amounted to? Shuteley's the most inflammable town in England -- perhaps in Europe."

"You mean, a fire only had to start, and it would be bad?"

"Something like that." My thoughts were jumbled. Sometimes I thought the giants had done it all, with my black-halted playmate Snow White as the schemer-in-chief. Then I found myself dismissing the giants as an irrelevance, mere spectators.

"Gradually, of course, the risks have been lessening," I said. "But you know Shuteley . . . changes that would take ten years anywhere else take fifty in Shuteley. And this summer there's been hardly any rain. Not only the town is bone dry, but the grass, the bushes, the trees. The river's as low as it has ever been."

"You think it's very bad, don't you?" Sheila said quietly.

I did, though in an oddly theoretical, uncommitted way. So far I was only guessing.

So I mused: "Maybe this is the fire that's going to change our whole conception of safety measures. When the Titanic sank; there was no rule that there had to be lifeboat accommodation for every passenger. The company thought they'd done pretty well because they'd done far more than the regulations demanded . . . We did the same. I'm sure of it. A lot more could have been done in Shuteley."

After a pause, thinking of the giants again, I said bitterly: "I should have known. I had all the clues."

"What could you have done?"

"Nothing, I suppose. I don't know. Tried to get the police to move the giants on, perhaps. Watch them. Make sure they didn't have a chance to do any damage."

"Then you do think they did it."

"I don't how. But if they didn't start the fire, they knew it was going to happen."

"Miranda too?" She said it quite evenly, with no detectable malice.

"Miranda too," I said bleakly.

It seemed to take an interminable time to drive ten miles. The road was narrow and winding, It was not possible to average more than forty, and in trying to do the journey too quickly I was losing time, and knew it, and lost more time trying to make it up. By this time I had realized we'd have reached Shuteley sooner if I'd asked Sheila to drive. My brain was too involved with other considerations to allow me to drive well. But I didn't want to stop now to let her take over. The time lost might be greater than the time saved.

"I never knew this road was so long," I groaned.

"What can you do when you get there?"

"I don't how. At least make sure the firemen, the police, everybody involved, know about the giants, if they don't already."

"Val," said Sheila quietly, "calm down. Think -- no matter how bad it looks, it's only a fire -- "

"Only a fire!" I almost screamed.

"Please, Val . . . Shuteley doesn't consist entirely of wooded houses. You said yourself safety modifications are always being made. Spaces have been cleared. And we have a modern firefighting service, with the latest equipment. You know that as well as I do. Better."

Her calm words took effect, although we now smelt smoke, burning wood, burning rubber, and -- I hoped I was imagining this -- burning flesh.

Of course she was right -- despite the inferno we were driving towards, the orange gouts of flame shooting high into the dark sky, the billowing clouds of smoke pouring upwards, the sudden spurts of flame which told of oil explosions or gas leaks.

What we were seeing, the red-orange-yellow glow which made driving difficult, dimming the headlights, must, simply had to be, far worse in appearance than it was in actuality. It looked as if we were approaching a city the size of Manchester ablaze from end to end. And Shuteley would be lost in a suburb of Manchester.

I took a bend with a screaming of tires and for a minute or two, frustratingly, we were tearing along at right-angles to the blaze, getting no nearer. There was a slight rise just this side of the river, which meant that we wouldn't get a direct view of the town until we were within two hundred yards of the Suspension Bridge.

Yet as Sheila said, it couldn't be all that bad. Shuteley being a town in which fires that did occur could be more serious more quickly than in other places, the fire-fighting service was that much more efficient and better equipped. In the Great Fire of London there could have been little the Londoners could do except throw buckets of water over smoldering timbers. In Shuteley, a great deal of damage was undoubtedly being done, lives might be lost, but the outbreak would be contained.

I remembered Dina again, and caught my breath as I found myself thinking that if she died, one problem was solved . . .

No. I didn't want problems to be solved that way.

At last I reached the end of the straight and was able to turn towards the maelstrom again. Suddenly I braked, briefly, as I saw something across the road.

Sheila screamed and cut her scream off abruptly. I was able to slow the car enough to hit the obstruction gently, but not enough to stop short of it. It looked like molten lava flowing sullenly across the road . . .

There was a brief check, nothing more. It was water flowing across, turned dull red by the glow in the sky.

The car hit the last rise, and we both coughed. We were breathing thick wood-smoke. My eyes stung so fiercely so quickly that I braked again, braked harder as a cloud of smoke swept across the road, obscuring everything.

Yet it was a practically windless night, and most of the smoke and flames rose straight up. Nor was there even a breeze to fan the flames. That was something.

Then we were over the hill, almost at the river, and we saw the hell that was Shuteley.

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